Dream Girl
by Punctuator
Summary: With apologies for the title, one for the Robert Fischer fans. A semi-sinister life-lessons story set a couple of years before the movie. Rated for language, violence, and semi-adult situations. Welcome to dreams, reality, and the things in between...
1. Chapter 1

**DREAM GIRL**

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He did his best. He tried. Though he hadn't started out as the proverbial Dickensian apprentice, hauling his way up the Fischer-Morrow corporate ladder— for one thing, his father was an expedient man who saw no inherent value in unfocused skill-sets, in work for work's sake; for another, family dignity wouldn't permit Maurice Fischer's heir to log time in the call center or customer service— Robert Fischer worked hard for what he was, that is to say a semi-involuntary son of privilege. He'd obtained the proper university degrees at the proper universities. He attended meetings, acted in project groups, took hard-hatted trips to the company's refineries and reactors worldwide, studied figures and data, wrote reports. He attended meetings without dozing; he asked well-thought-out questions of the research staff; he listened attentively to the answers.

#####

He was working late tonight, but he wasn't alone in the gaping expanse of his office. Under a brass reading lamp a good twenty feet from his desk (which, Fischer thought, could, with minimal modification, double as a regulation-size pool table), Peter Browning, slouched on a black butter-leather sofa, was peering through his half-frame reading glasses at the data pad propped between shirt-buttons on his stomach.

"I think he's gone," Browning said, not looking up. In the room's perfect soundproofing, the words hung as if imprinted on the still air.

Fischer glanced away from the trio of monitors on his desk, blinked from his tired eyes the glowing ghosts of the screens. "What's that, Uncle Peter?"

"I think Joey just left. That's what you were waiting for, wasn't it?" As he spoke, Browning looked across the room at him. He'd been a handsome man once; now, having passed through dissolution to middle age, Browning could hide a smile in the leather of his face.

Not from his godson, though. Fischer, caught out, smiled back. "Yeah."

He saved his spreadsheets, pass-locked his MegaMac, took his suit jacket from the upholstered chair, a sibling of the sofa on which Browning was slumped, that stood within a jacket-toss of the desk. Joseph Bartel, as shambling but as quick and muscular in his hide as an old California grizzly, was Fischer's personal chief of security: every night, or nearly so, Fischer would tell him he was working late and that he'd close up; in lieu of questioning Maurice Fischer's son's orders, Bartel would find things to do for an hour or so, hovering, listening, walking the halls, re-checking the lavatories and the conference rooms, before finally conceding the waiting game and going home.

"You could just tell the bastard to pack it in. You can do that, you know," Browning said.

Fischer flinched as he shrugged into his suit jacket. "He's only doing his job, Uncle Peter."

"You're too soft, Bobby. Where're you off to tonight?"

"I don't know yet—"

"Just want to get out on your own, drive around?"

"Yes." How exotic that sounded, how ridiculously daring: the simple prospect of wandering off, at very likely legal speeds, into the night. He hesitated, frowning. "Isn't it strange—"

"Jesus, you're not going to get all philosophical now, are you?"

"— how we can be where we are— be _who _we are—"

"I'll assume you're using the royal 'we.'"

Something he would never have dared to say to his father: "—and still feel trapped?"

Browning yawned. "Direct proportions, Robert." He looked back at his data pad. "Power-to-persecution-complex, something like that."

"I was just thinking—"

"Don't. I mean it: don't. I'll have my people in accounting run the actual ratios for you, if it'll make you happy." Browning chuckled. "Now shut up and get the hell out of here before I call Joey back."

#####

So as not to hear the helpful words "I'll call for your driver, Mr. Fischer," he bypassed the main elevator bank, the lobby, and Bartel's compatriots at the ground-level security desk. Unknotting and pocketing his tie, he rode one of the back elevators down to the underground car-park, where waited, in the near corner on the spotlessly clean concrete floor, a black Jaguar XF, glistening in the low light like a drop of oil. Shiny enough for the driver's-side door to reflect him as he approached: in two dimensions on the Jag's clearcoated skin moved a young man with a compact frame, a slender build unwarped in the depth of the black paint, wearing a charcoal-gray double-breasted suit. Reddish-brown hair combed back off a modestly squared forehead, lips a touch too full to be fully masculine, high cheekbones. No amount of hand-waxing, though, could coax from the Jaguar's finish the light freckling on those cheekbones, or the bottle-glass blue of Fischer's wideset eyes, which some, Fischer's closest acquaintances and corporate rivals alike, found disconcertingly pale. The company's publicists told him he was good-looking. Fischer tended to take such assessments with a slight smile and a hint of skepticism.

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It was a rainy cold July night. He got the Jag out on Highway One and drove. No sound from the stereo. Nothing but the whisper-and-tick of the windshield wipers, the soft buzz of the tires on the wet pavement, the throaty purr of the engine. When he realized the car was as much as driving itself, when the pattern of the raindrops in the light from the headlamps had become hypnotic, he turned back toward town. He ended up at Gilliam's, a bar in Surry Hills.

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She was in her mid-twenties, by the look of her, average height, slender without being bone-thin, said slenderness being clothed in a short-sleeved peacock-blue dress whose modest cut bespoke either an internship or a quick drink on the way home from the office. She had long dark hair, and Fischer's peripherals told him she was confidently pretty, not beautiful. Lips just full enough, high cheekbones, blue eyes, features that erred slightly on the side of strength, not delicacy. She leaned in beside him, caught the patient eye of rawboned tall Bill Doherty, the bartender, and in a voice that hinted of applewood pipe-smoke and British leanings ordered a mojito. The light caught coppery seams in Doherty's hair as he smiled, nodded, and went off to work his alchemy.

Though not boisterous, Gilliam's was full. The last remaining stool, to Fischer's left, had until now been his buffer. As she eased onto it, the young woman said, as if by way of apology: "This place does a great muddled mojito."

Too-suddenly aware of her proximity, Fischer turned his glass by its cool rim between the fingertips of his right hand. Vodka tonic. One of two. His usual. He watched the light trapped and flashing in the the ice cubes and asked: "Are you working?"

"Sorry—?"

Fischer snorted. Sure, he might have made a mistake in gravitating to one of his known haunts, but this was truly irritating, even by Maurice Fischer's standards of passive-aggressive parental control. "My father sent you, didn't he? The agency sent you."

"What agency? I don't understand what you're—"

"Never mind," Fischer said.

"Agency? What agency? What are you talking about?" She kept her voice low, but she seemed to be getting legitimately, even a little frighteningly, upset.

Looking at her, Fischer suddenly felt a sick, sinking mortification. He'd made a mistake, a terrible mistake. "I'm sorry," he said, as anger and incredulity flickered to life like blue flame in her eyes. "I shouldn't have assumed—"

"What? That I was a hooker?"

Doherty set her drink in front of her. She reached for her purse. "Please: allow me," Fischer said. He looked up at Doherty. "Bill, put that on my tab, would you?"

"Yes, Mr. Fischer."

Doherty moved away. Fischer turned back to the girl. "Really, I apologize."

She looked at him for a long moment. The anger left her expression, unsparked from her slate-blue eyes. "That's fine. Don't worry about it." Her shoulders untensed as she spoke. She smiled, reached for her drink. "Tell me: that suit. Ballpark guess. Sixteen hundred dollars American…?"

"Umm… nearer twenty-three. But that's not—"

"You must have a really good dry cleaner, then, am I right?"

Before Fischer could reply, she calmly poured the contents of her glass down the front of his shirt.

#####

Between the surreality and the shock, Fischer's gasp at the chill of the liquor puddling suddenly in his lap and navel, and Doherty materializing with a horrified expression and a clean bar towel, she made good her escape. In five seconds, she was out the door and gone.

Doherty asked: "Should I have the bouncer bring her back, Mr. Fischer?"

"No. No, Bill, it's alright." Fischer rose, still mopping his torso. He handed the towel back to Doherty, unpocketed his wallet, left a twenty for a tip. He made his way to the door, stepped out into the midwinter air, sharper now and chillier not only because of the alcohol evaporating from his skin but for his having been sitting amidst the warmth of a crowd.

To his right, a cross-street and then nothing but sleeting rain, wind, lights from shops and restaurants making timorous headway against the winter dark. A handful of pedestrians, jacketed, their collars turned up, none of them her. Fischer went left, along the long axis of the block. Two-story clumps of businesses interspersed with flats, old but well-maintained houses standing in the night-shade of mature trees. He came to another intersection, paused. No one ahead of him, no one moving across the way, to his right. The sidewalk to his left led off into a deeper darkness, past a yard bordered by a black wrought-iron fence.

That way, maybe thirty feet off, he heard a scuffle. The scratching of shoe-soles on wet paving. A woman's panicked breathing, a man's ugly voice: "Don't fight me, you bitch."

The trees blocked the light from the streetlamps. Fischer's eyes adjusted as he walked, then jogged, toward the struggling pair.

Then, as he didn't stop, take out his phone, and call the police, Fischer thought he saw a flash of metal at what had to be the man's waist level.

_Knife._

"No— Don't—!" Fischer found himself now charging at the dark tangle of bodies. He got the man from behind, by the shoulders. The knife clattered on the sidewalk. Fischer spun the man around— no: actually, he was turning around on his own. The woman broke free— and it _was_ her, the girl from Gilliam's— as a cinder-block fist collided with Fischer's right cheek. He could have sworn his skull rang like a bell. He staggered, and the man grabbed again for the woman. As black light flashed behind his retinas, Fischer saw her kick him in the right knee, stomp his instep. Saw her turn and run.

The man let her go. He turned his attentions back to Fischer, and his unkicked knee caught Fischer in the chin. A new burst of pain, a slash of salty, bloody warmth in his mouth as he bit his own lip, and Fischer felt himself lurch. He fell on his side on the cold wet sidewalk. A seesaw rushing filled his ears. He was vaguely aware of the man rifling through his pockets. He felt a tugging on his left wrist as the man took his watch. With his struck cheek pillowed on grit, he thought he could still see the girl, running off. He thought he could still hear her footsteps.

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He heard, definitely, the sound of a police siren before he blacked out.

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	2. Chapter 2

**A/N:** Just a quick note of thanks to everyone who's read and commented on this thing. I should be more conscientious about responding individually, as, absolutely and always, kind words are the fuel that keep this sorry engine ticking along, but I've been swamped with work (and, more excusably, maybe, with writing), and all in all I'm an utter bum, no hallelujahs about it. Here's a monster chunk of a chapter by at least indirect way of apology. Enjoy...!

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Fischer's first mistake was in trying to stand up. When he heard the siren, his subconscious mind told him to acknowledge authority (even that of public servants), to straighten, to make himself presentable. As his father would want him to do.

His subconscious and his father were fools.

Misjudging his equilibrium was his second blunder. Bluntly: he stumbled. Into one of the officers alighting from the white checker-striped Ford police sedan. Who caught Fischer, who panicked and windmilled with his arms, and who was then pinned facedown on the Ford's stubby boot.

His third mistake, which compounded his flailing, however unintentional, was the fact that he smelled like a whole bottle of rum. The smell, if not the flailing, earned him a handcuffing.

The septuagenarian good Samaritan who had squinted out past her porch light to the tree-befuddled shadows on the sidewalk and phoned in the assault had spoken only of a man attacking a woman. One man. She hadn't seen one man run off after beating a second to the ground; in going for the phone she hadn't, in fact, seen the woman herself escape. When the police arrived, they found, ostensibly, one half of the equation. That being one man.

Or, more simply, it came down to this: when in doubt, arrest the one you can catch. The one who stinks of alcohol. Even if he's wearing a decidedly upscale suit and has blood dribbling down his chin.

#####

The Surry Hills police station. A sluicegate of concrete slabs slicing into the bruised night sky. Like the levels of a parking garage tipped on end. The two arresting officers, male, grim-faced, efficient, and, most unlike their charge, well-balanced, hauled Fischer by his upper arms past the ticket-booth exterior, the windows staring blankly and blackly back at the rain, through the sliding glass doors.

He might easily have come across as unstable mentally as he was physically; in any case, his two escorts stood with him at the booking desk. The booking officer, whose name tag eluded the present scope of Fischer's visual focus, was balding, heavy-browed, otherwise fine-featured. The contrast was disconcerting. The light from the monitor before him lent a blue tinge to the man's skin.

"Name," he said.

"I'm Robert Fischer."

The booking officer hoisted his substantial brows. Inquisitively, Fischer thought.

"Of Fischer-Morrow Industries, Unlimited," he offered, by way of annotation.

"Of course you are. And I'm Father Christmas."

"I'm chipped, officer." Fischer thought he could feel the plates of his skull warping in time to his pulse. He hoped the word "officer" hadn't sounded as much like a tonal surrogate for "you idiot" to the policemen as it had to him.

"If, by 'chipped,' you mean 'thoroughly pissed,'" the officer muttered to Fischer's booking screen.

"I'm entitled to a scan," Fischer heard himself say.

"That you are." The speaker was a woman, uniformed, short, square through the shoulders, her pony-tailed hair dusty blonde in the light from the fluorescents. "Mister—"

"Fischer," flatly, from the booking officer.

"—Mr. Fischer, I'm Senior Constable Towne, the station's custody manager. I'm going to inform you of your rights."

Fischer nodded as he was thus informed. Or thought he nodded. He might have been absolutely stationary; the room itself might have been on gimbals. They moved him to a black vinyl-cushioned chair, very stable on heavy steel legs, while Towne droned her recitation of the legal contract between the constabulary and the confined, detainors and detainees.

"You appear to be intoxicated, Mr. Fischer," she said in conclusion, Fischer having heard maybe one word in three of the speech that came before. "Do we have permission to draw a sample of your blood?"

Fischer offered another nod, numbly.

"We'll do the scan in addition to the draw. Won't take but a minute."

#####

In a tiny examining room away from the traffic of the booking area, Fischer, post-needle-prick, post-sampling, removed, in addition to his dirty suit jacket, his mojito-soaked shirt. The station medic found the Genochip right where Fischer said it would be, below his left shoulder blade, where kidnappers would have a tough time getting at it without killing him.

Two minutes later, while Fischer washed his bloody face and made his permitted phone call, one of the arresting officers drifted past the booking desk and said, drolly: "I'll take a pony for Christmas, Santa."

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Browning showed up with Ian Redmond, one of the company's senior attorneys, slender and energetic, impeccably suited in black, with fierce gray eyes in a weathered sixtyish face, a stormfront of gray hair swept back off his high forehead. It might have been half past a stale midnight, but Redmond looked as if he'd been caught immediately following a brisk and refreshing mid-morning walk. He joined Fischer in one of the station's interrogation rooms at one side of a bolted-down metal table. An officer by the name of Monroe seated himself opposite them. He had a forty-something face, broadly handsome, eyes like shale, a mouth that was slightly too wide. Kiwi-brown hair that would likely remain at the same point of thinning for the rest of his life. Redmond introduced himself as Fischer's lawyer. He then asked, in the deferentially apologetic manner of a man who had just missed the ordering of cocktails:

"With what, might I ask, is Mr. Fischer being charged, Sergeant?"

"Detective Sergeant."

"Ah: the V.I.P. treatment, Robert," Redmond said, his expression, like his tone, blancmange-smooth.

Detective Sergeant Monroe frowned at him. "Mr. Fischer is being charged with assault, possibly in the course of attempted robbery."

"And who is the complainant?"

D.S. Monroe hesitated. Fischer opened his mouth to speak; Redmond calmly waved him silent.

"She hasn't come forward as of yet," Monroe said.

"Ah. Difficult to prosecute assault charges with no victim, wouldn't you agree? Also: I find it odd that Mr. Fischer is being charged with robbery when it appears that it's _his_ wallet and watch that have gone missing." Before Monroe could reply, Redmond asked: "Is there anything else, Detective Sergeant Monroe?"

"Mr. Fischer exhibited behavior leading us to believe he might be intoxicated—"

"Which accusation the test of Mr. Fischer's blood has already disproved. I ask again, Detective Sergeant: will there be anything else?"

"I have several more questions regarding the incident in the pub. If Mr. Fischer is willing to answer said questions, of course."

"I believe Mr. Fischer has had enough for one—"

"No, Ian." Fischer sat forward, placed his forearms on the table. "I'd like to finish this tonight."

Monroe met his eyes, nodded. "The girl at Gilliam's: would you recognize her if you saw her again?"

"Of course."

"The barman told the investigating constable she threw a drink in your face."

"No. She poured it on me, quite calmly."

Two looks: a mildly incredulous one from Redmond, a skeptical one from the Detective Sergeant. "Explain," Monroe said.

"I misinterpreted her presence, I made a callous remark, and she poured her drink down my shirt."

"Were you trying to effect an assignation with her, Mr. Fischer?"

Fischer felt his aching face go hot. "Such elegant phrasing for an officer of the law," Redmond murmured. "Bravo, Detective Sergeant."

"No," Fischer replied. "No, I wasn't."

"Would you like to swear out a complaint against her, Mr. Fischer?"

Fischer thought he'd misheard. A too-quick turn of events for his pounding skull. "I beg your pardon—?"

"Detective Sergeant Monroe is asking whether you'd like to have her tracked down and arrested for assault, Robert," said Redmond. "Aren't you?" he asked Monroe.

Monroe ignored him. "Mr. Fischer—?"

"No. That won't be necessary."

"Which leads us to a related question," Redmond said. He trained a sudden, hard stare on D.S. Monroe. "To what extent are your officers responsible for Mr. Fischer's injuries, Detective Sergeant Monroe?"

D.S. Monroe bristled, tried unsuccessfully not to wince.

"Then I think we're done here," Redmond said. "Is Mr. Fischer free to leave?"

It really wasn't a question. "Yes," Monroe said.

Redmond took Fischer discreetly but firmly by the upper arm as they rose. Until that moment, nearly leaning into the man's stabilizing grip, Fischer hadn't realized how unsteady he still was, how hard he was shaking.

#####

Browning had a driver and a black Mercedes company sedan waiting outside. Redmond had his own car, an ancient and water-sleek Aston Martin that crouched in the rain in the car park like a silver android panther.

"Thanks for meeting us on such short notice, Ian," Browning said.

Redmond shook the offered hand. "Quite all right, Peter. That's what retainers are for."

His expression, though, as he turned for Fischer's handshake, seemed to stop just short of disapproving. Fischer looked into Redmond's intent eyes and saw _You, young man, on the other hand—_

"Was I wrong in not having her brought in for questioning?"

Redmond's face stilled to an almost-imperceptible frown, as though young Fischer, despite being the son of an eminently powerful man, had said something too obvious to be in good taste. "For questioning? If you ask me, she ought to be brought in and flogged." He smiled then, slightly, diplomatically. "I hope the remainder of your evening is more pleasant, Mr. Fischer. Good night."

#####

As he settled into the back seat of the Mercedes, Browning emitted a morbid snort. "Hell, Bobby, you should have gone straight home. You look like the loser in a curb-kick contest." A sniff, a grimace. "What the hell— Is that mint? Were you chewing gum?"

Fischer ignored him. He reached into his breast pocket for his phone, found it missing. _Of course. Shit._ He looked in frustration to Browning, who handed him his phone. Fischer dialed through to his after-hours personal assistant. "This is Robert, Therese. Cancel my credit cards and my license, please—"

Browning shook his head. _Trace_, he mouthed.

"—scratch that: Cancel and re-issue the license; put a trace on the cards."

"We'll get them," Browning said, as Fischer handed back his phone. "They won't get far."

"Just one, Uncle Peter." He sat back, felt his remaining energy dissipate as he did. He found himself mumbling around his swollen and blood-sour lip what he'd mumbled to the police: "There was just one. Caucasian male, dark hair, twenty-five to thirty-five, six feet tall, a hundred and seventy pounds—"

"You're babbling. There's never just one, Robert. Sons of bitches," he added, taking a longer look at Fischer's face. As he did, his expression conveyed genuine concern, something he preferred to keep far from the boardroom. He tapped the comm button. "Phil—"

_Yes, Mr. Browning._

"Swing us past Mr. Fischer's private clinic."

_Yes, sir._

"I just want to go home," Fischer said.

"You might need stitches for that lip," Browning replied.

#####

Browning waited for him at the clinic. Doctor Weller, bony-framed, thin through the face, his shock-blue eyes possessed of the slightly desocialized intensity common to those who'd worked too long on the nightshift, checked Fischer for concussion, did indeed stitch his lip, told him that he was lucky still to have all his teeth. He sent Fischer back to the Mercedes armed with half a bottle of painkillers. Browning accompanied Fischer to his Gloucester Street flat, made sure he got settled. Fischer was too tired and numb to tell Browning not to treat him like a child.

He asked, filtering himself a glass of water at the kitchen tap and downing a pain pill: "Does my father know?"

"Yes. He's already issued a memo."

_A memo._

Fischer, glass in hand, crossed to his office space, woke his Mac, leaned in, read from his Fischer-Morrow in-box:

**_Robert Fischer, whilst making a selfless attempt to aid the victim of a robbery in progress, _**_etc_.

_"Selfless": nice touch, Dad._ More et ceteras regarding identity or identities unknown and suspects remaining at large, culminating in

**_Mr. Fischer's injuries will not impair his performance of company-related duties. _**Not even a "We are relieved to say" or "Join me in wishing him well." If anything, Maurice was more concerned with heading off a scandal, and in milking a few drops of goodwill and publicity from the situation.

Browning waited until Fischer looked away from the screen. "What he's actually saying is he thinks you let yourself walk right into a trap."

"Do you believe that?"

"I ought to," Browning said. "I'm the one who suggested it to him."

"Thanks. Thanks so much."

"Sounds a little bit better than 'Golden-boy Bobby got himself plastered and attacked a woman he met in a bar,' doesn't it?"

"He needs his accountant to tell him when his son might be in trouble." He caught himself, seeing the sudden hurt hardening in Browning's expression. "I'm sorry, Uncle Peter. That was out of line."

"It's okay. You've had a hell of a night." Browning for a moment stood at the main-floor wall of window. A calm breath, one, two, as he looked north to the city lights, the darkness, the deeper blue-black of the water of the harbor. "He does care for you, you know."

He managed not to make it sound rote. Fischer didn't reply.

Browning asked, as he went to the door: "Do you want Security to find out who she really is?"

"No. That won't be necessary." Fischer turned from the computer, looked at his godfather. He swallowed around a sudden tightness in his throat. "Thank you for— for—"

"You'd bail me out, too." With a grip on the door handle, Browning smiled, shrugged. "Goodnight, Robert."

#####

Not surprisingly, he spent the rest of the night alone.

Shortly before Fischer's eighteenth birthday, Maurice Fischer had determined his son to be heterosexual. Not through the usual channels of inquiry and observation, the sifting of the security reports that detailed his boy's nocturnal activities, no: Fischer, like God setting the energy state of a subatomic particle through the simple act of divine observation, had decided Robert's sexual preference. Accordingly, shortly after Robert turned eighteen, Maurice had arranged for him to lose his virginity at the capable hands and assorted feminine orifices of an employee of Maurice's preferred escort service. Safer that way. Sensible. The thought of his son embarking on a series of random carnal encounters disturbed Maurice not from a moral standpoint but from a pragmatic one: the idea of dealing with (and he employed the term loosely, with an eye both to scandal and the potential use of extreme measures) a string of young women with toddlers in tow, ready to gnash with their peg-like milk-teeth on the Fischer empire and fortune, was the stuff of headaches, if not nightmares.

So: Robert could for now sow his wild oats safely amongst the ladies of the agency. Then, in five years or so, at Maurice's suggestion, he would parse the pages of the social register linked to the Fortune Global 500 and choose a bride suitable to perpetuate the Fischer name.

Best to keep one's intimate connections clean and easily severable. If he had been a praying man in addition to a widower, Maurice Fischer might have asked God never to let his son learn why that was true.

#####

Said son read no mother-issues into his dealings with the girls of the agency. Nothing Freudian, nothing Oedipal. He neither sought out nor avoided women with soft brown hair, full lips and wide cheekbones, eyes the color of clear blue glass.

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He'd never minded the arrangement. Honestly, he hadn't cared enough to mind. A girl came to him periodically, or he called for one, and she saw to his needs. Briefly or languorously, in ten minutes' time or all night, roughly or gently: he had only to choose.

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The thought of such choices had never bothered him before. Now, with the painkiller drawing him off to sleep, Fischer found the idea somehow chilling.

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Had he been inclined to seek scapegoats, or had he been less exhausted, drugged, and sore, he might have blamed the girl in Gilliam's.

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Fischer was proud of himself. Despite his skull, which was doing a credible impersonation of an active construction site, he was up for his ten dozen pushups and his morning run. He was showered, shaved, in his office at his usual self-designated start time. Then, after the ten a.m. meeting of the Fischer-Morrow cabinet, while broken rain clouds seemingly on level with the floor-to-ceiling windows at either end of the hall fled like refugees of war across a cold blue sky, his father stopped Fischer outside the main conference room. Maurice placed his hand for a moment on his son's right shoulder, as gently or as carelessly as he would if he were reaching for a piece of lint. "You might concentrate on your private duties for a few days, Robert," he said quietly.

"Yes, sir."

Fischer didn't realize what his father meant until Fischer, Sr., had walked away. Maurice wasn't counseling rest, speaking out of concern. He was telling Robert to keep himself hidden until he looked less like a man who had been in a bar fight.

#####

Up, and working. Behind the red oak door of his office, cloistering his bruised cheek, his swollen lip, the blackened socket of his right eye, from the apparent disapproval of the Fischer-Morrow corporate environment. Seated at his desk, Fischer caught movement to his left; thinking it was Nancy Crawford, his solid, sensible, sharp-eyed administrative assistant, he turned his head so as to hide the right side of his face.

It wasn't Nancy. Other than she and Fischer's father, only one other denizen of the Fischer-Morrow world would walk in without knocking.

"You should be in bed," Browning said.

"You saw the memo," Fischer replied, coolly. "Mr. Fischer will not be impaired in the performance of his duties. Maurice said so himself."

#####

Browning continued to be more than usually solicitous for the remainder of the day, which concern manifested itself even as a hounding throughout lunch. Fischer ate in the Mojave-esque expanse of his office; with his typical bullish tact, Browning invited himself to join him.

"They were setting you up, Robert," he said, chopping at the hardboiled egg in his Cobb salad. "Dream-girl and the guy outside Gilliam's."

Fischer picked at the tofu hiding amongst his own plateful of greens. "I don't believe that, Uncle Peter."

"Come on. She was the bait, you fell for it, and he was waiting for you."

"Practically out in the open? And why didn't they max the cards, then? They've had plenty of time."

"Maybe they knew the cards would be traced."

"No."

"Anyway, we know who she is."

"I told you not to check into her."

"Here." Browning picked a black plastic folder from his briefcase, slid it to Fischer's side of the table. "We got her on a facial match. CCTV camera outside the bar." He opened the cover of the folder, and Fischer found himself looking at the girl from Gilliam's. She looked back at him in crisp digital color. Her dark hair was pulled back; her serge-blue eyes were serious. Or troubled, hollow, a little lost. He didn't look farther. "Recruitment photo," Browning said. "Royal Air Force. She's ex-military, Robert."

"I don't care."

"Then maybe I'll have to care _for_ you. She could be part of a terrorist group. Kidnappers. I should have her picked up right now—"

"You'll do no such thing." Fischer stood, stared Browning hard in the eyes. "You tell me I'm too soft, Uncle Peter: fine. You're to take no action with regard to that woman without express authorization from my father, which said authorization I will need to confirm in person. Is that understood?"

"Understood." A moment later, Browning broke eye contact. A moment after that, he was trying to hide a chuckle by clearing his throat. "Sorry— I can't help it." Appropriately serious, he looked back at Fischer. "Very nicely done, Mr. Fischer. Don't be afraid to use that in the boardroom."

#####

Fischer swallowed another painkiller, skipped dinner, and continued to work through the afternoon well into the night. A blend of anger and frustration, at his father, at himself, at the girl, fueled a wavering but implacable momentum. Finally, he was alone on the executive floor. Joe Bartel, having assumed that Robert, following his experiences on the previous evening, wouldn't be trying to slip past Security and his driver again any time soon, had called his goodnight from the door of Fischer's office and gone home. That had been an hour ago.

With the northern European regional statistics and related projections and his notes regarding same spread across his three monitors, he lost a handful of seconds to the backs of his eyelids. He started awake. His body said _Sleep_. The sofa was right there. Ten minutes, fifteen. He could set the alarm on his watch.

_His stolen watch._

The onyx-faced Oris he wore was practically the twin of the Oris that had been pulled from his wrist last night. It, like its lost twin, had an alarm.

Fischer saved his work, stood up. He began to set the alarm. He looked at the face of the Oris and paused. He thought _Do you want my watch?_

He unclasped the band, slid the watch bumping over his knuckles.

_I said, Do you fucking want my fucking watch—?_

He clenched the Oris in his right hand. He snarled, silently—

_You fucking bastard._

Fischer swung toward the window behind him, gripping the Oris like a baseball, and hauled back his right arm—

He stopped. Nearly stumbled, catching himself right before the watch flew at the night-black glass. "God," he whispered.

He set the wristwatch on the edge of his desk and left his office. The break room that served the floor's executive-assistant staff and doubled as refreshments prep for one of the secondary conference rooms was right across the way. He found the pods, a mug, brewed himself a cup of coffee from the single-serve machine. Took a sip and hissed in pain: the liquid was like lava on his stitched lip.

He crossed back to his office, mug in hand, set the coffee to cool by the Oris while he went back to work.

After ninety seconds, a hundred, he reached again for the mug. Sipped.

Worked. Forty-five seconds later, he drank again, set the mug down.

Fifteen seconds after that, he was fast asleep.

#####

The security cameras on the floor that housed Fischer's office were gazing inwardly at a looping digital file that showed nothing but empty hallway. The cameras didn't see the three janitors dressed in FMI royal-blue uniform tops and trousers or the wheeled black recyclables bin they were trundling between them. They didn't see that one of the the janitors was a slight, pale young man with straight black hair and light hazel eyes. They didn't see that his first companion, not unlike the man whose knuckle-prints Robert Fischer bore in the form of a yellowish-green fist-sized bruise on his right cheek, was a dark-haired Caucasian male, twenty-five to thirty-five, a shade over six feet tall, roughly one hundred and seventy pounds.

They didn't see that the third janitor was the young woman from Gilliam's.

#####

"We'll have to be sure to clear out the rest of those pods," said the larger of the men. "It might look suspicious if _all _the coffee-drinkers fall asleep at the next board meeting."

As he spoke, he crossed the sand-colored carpet to where Robert Fischer sat slumped before his trio of computer monitors, deeply asleep. He drew Fischer's chair back slightly from the desk; with quiet, powerful efficiency, he picked Fischer up and carried him to the sofa. The smaller man was there already with the recyclables cart, trying to wrest something the size and shape of a primitive portable sewing-machine case from the dry, sliding grip of a concealing heap of office paper.

"Need a hand, Nicky?" the first man asked, as he laid Fischer on the sofa.

Nick tried not to grunt as he lifted the case clear of the cart. Like the first man, he spoke clearly but barely above a murmur: "Screw you, Chris."

"As always, Nicholas, in your dreams. Susan—?"

The girl from Gilliam's was at the wall control for the room's panoramic windows, judging the amount of light and detail Fischer's office was broadcasting to the night sky from fifty floors up. She left the opacity setting where it was, pulled on a white cotton glove before pushing the button for the thermal curtains. She crossed to the sofa as the sliding panes whispered shut, knelt on the floor by Fischer's side. Nick was already loosening up the case's innards: dials, wires, IV lines running off a reservoir of golden liquid.

Susan touched Fischer's bruised cheek with ungloved fingertips. "Did you have to hit him so hard, Chris?"

"You know the process works better when the physical components are convincing."

"The process works better when the subject can physically wake up. You might have put him in a coma."

"What she's really saying, Chris," said Nick, as he dabbed Fischer's left wrist with odorless disinfectant and deftly slid the tip of an IV needle beneath the skin, "is that she thinks you get off on roughing up these rich corporate weasels."

"She gets off on fucking them. What's the difference?"

"Oh, a lawsuit, that's all." Susan's anger was sudden, sickening, and harsh. For a moment she clamped her jaw so tightly shut that she thought she felt her molars shift in her gums. "Maybe even prison time. The liability waiver doesn't cover permanent physical impairment."

"_Now_ you tell me."

"Don't be stupid, Chris. Miles could end up in terrible trouble. We all could."

She glared up at him. Chris stared stonily back at her.

"Behind door number one, ladies and gentlemen, a stalemate," murmured Nick. He held up dual sets of IV lines as he split a look between his teammates. "Would the owners of the clashing egos care to get to work?"

#####

#####

Fischer was back at—

— it had to be— no, it _was_— a new place, very much like Gilliam's, one with a twisty name. A name that, to his embarrassment, he couldn't quite recall. Nor could he quite recall arriving. He'd been too tired to drive. Phil must have brought him.

After he'd ordered his first vodka tonic, from a bartender who might have been Bill Doherty's cousin, she eased in next to him. The girl from Gilliam's. She was wearing a deep gray dress tonight, again short-sleeved, again agreeably modest. A piece of amethyst hung on a silver chain snuggled in the hollow at the base of her throat. "I wanted to apologize about last— Oh, my God. Your face—"

Until that moment, Fischer hadn't thought about his injuries, the night before, being robbed. Now the memory rekindled the pain in his cheek and jaw. Nonetheless, he found himself smiling. "It's alright. Nothing broken. Are you okay—?"

"Yes."

"Can I buy you a drink? One that you actually _drink_-drink—?"

She smiled back at him, though her eyes remained shy of his wounds. "Of course."

#####

Even in the time it took for her drink to arrive— and, again, she ordered a mojito— the bar grew noisier, stuffier, more crowded. "Should we get some air?" she asked.

Fischer hesitated, feeling a twinge of uncertainty as he recalled Browning's suspicions.

"Come on," she said, smiling for him as she stood. "It's a lovely evening."

She took his hand. Almost a shock at the contact, though not an unpleasant one. Fischer felt his heart-rate spike. Her grip was warm and firm. He paid for their drinks, and she led him through the press of the crowd, out into the cool night air.

#####

The sky was clear and black, spiked with stars. A chilled breeze blew from the south. He realized he had no idea where he was. The area looked familiar but unspecified. Likely he'd driven through it before, en route to somewhere else; no doubt he'd heard the bar recommended and given the name to his driver tonight on a whim. Phil's knowledge of the city rivaled that of the most seasoned cab driver. They passed shops still open or closed for the night, coffee cafes, restaurants, a pocket-park like a stage set dressed with grass wispily overgrown, lamps on black iron poles casting soft light onto a paved walking path and the bark-tread of oaks.

She asked, before Fischer had the chance: "Don't you think it's too much of a coincidence, us meeting again like this?"

"There's no such thing as coincidence," he replied.

"Don't tell me you believe in fate."

"No. Something my godfather says: some decisions are made subconsciously. He also says that if will were truly free, then everyone could afford it."

A tactfully mild frown, which Fischer saw out of the corner of his eye. "That's... interesting," she said, finally.

"Do you want to say 'elitist'? Go on, no one's watching." He listened to her laugh; he smiled. "You're not from around here. I'm guessing London."

"Very good." They drifted closer together; her right shoulder nudged his left upper arm. Not quite by accident. "You haven't asked my name."

"You haven't asked mine," Fischer countered.

"You're Robert Fischer."

Of course she knew who he was. Like anyone else, she must read newsfeeds, watch TV. What Fischer felt, coldly centered under his sternum, was best described as disappointment. Not fear: Browning's warnings about dark spaces, traps, being lured out, were far from his thoughts.

She looked, saw the new stillness in his expression. "I'm sorry. I should have pretended I didn't know."

"No." Fischer stopped, caught her by the hand, stopped her, too. Again, now, came the feeling that he didn't quite recognize the street. But he couldn't know every street, could he? He wasn't a gazetteer; like many men of wealth and power and pretension, he was both too quickly on the move and enslaved to the means of that too-quick motion: fast cars, GPS, drivers like Phil, whose seamless efficiency turned every trip into a simple pairing of departure and arrival.

None of which, excuse or fact, seemed important right now. He looked into her troubled blue eyes and said, gently: "I'm glad you told the truth."

"But—"

The breeze picked up, caught at her long dark hair. Fischer, still holding her hand, felt her shiver.

"Here." He shrugged out of his suit jacket, put it around her shoulders. As he did, he noticed for the first time that it was the same jacket he'd been wearing the night before. Clean now, completely unsoiled. "That's odd—"

"What is?"

"Nothing." When her eyes remained on him, friendly but inquisitive, he added: "You were right. I _do _have a very good dry cleaner."

They were beginning to circle back toward the bar. "So: names," she said, drawing Fischer's jacket more snugly around her shoulders. "I'm—"

"Can I guess?" Fischer asked, softly.

A bemused glance. "Sure."

"You're Susan Gaumont."

She responded, without hesitating but without accusation, either: "Turnabout being fair play?"

"I must have seen it somewhere. A memo, a press release. Corporate profile, maybe."

"It's tough staying invisible these days."

"Tell me about it." For a second, a second only, Fischer saw in his mind a black plastic folder, a name below a woman's photo. The second passed. The night air felt refreshing, not too cool, through his dress shirt. "Here's an awful thought: you work for one of our competitors. Worse: you work for us."

"Why would that be worse?"

"House protocol. I wouldn't be able to—"

"— to—?"

Almost shyly: "— get to know you better."

"No sleeping with the boss?"

Fischer felt himself blush. "You're very direct, aren't you?"

"Yes, I am. And, if it comes down to that, we're in luck. I work for a private security consultant."

"Which accounts for the toned arms, then."

Again, she laughed. A low, soft sound, as heady and sweet as casked cream sherry. "That makes a change. Most guys would be looking at my tits."

Her words were meant to shock but not to wound; she spoke to him intimately on this odd winter night, on this street he was just shy of recognizing; and Fischer asked, feeling no longer shy in fact but daring now, even impulsive: "Is this a dream?"

Beside him, walking with her arm touching his, she hesitated.

He wasn't voicing a cliche´. She didn't pretend that she thought he was. She looked at him frankly and said: "Yes, it is."

Fischer went thoughtfully quiet.

She gave him ten paces' time before she prompted, gently: "Tell me, Robert."

"I was just wondering: is it my dream or yours?"

They were nearly back to the bar, passing along a stretch of rough brick outer wall. An alley opened to the right, about twenty feet ahead. Susan smiled slightly, possibly, Fischer thought, with admiration, and said, in lieu of reply, "My car's just up ahead."

#####

Passing the alley, Fischer felt himself shrinking inwardly, as though its greater darkness were that much colder than the darkness all around. Almost as if he could feel it pressing like packed ice against his right side.

And which made it all the more frightening when the man's voice came from directly _behind_ them. "You fucking whore."

Fischer turned as Susan did. Felt a stab of fear so primal it seemed to initiate at a cellular level.

It was the man from last night. The man who'd beaten and robbed him. Who'd attacked Susan. Now he was maybe fifteen feet away. Susan said, her voice shaking: "Leave us alone, Chris."

Fischer asked, incredulously, not even thinking how it was impossible, how this was a dream: "You _know_ him?"

"I met him shortly after I arrived in Sydney. He's been following me. Harassing me."

"You lying slut." Chris didn't advance on them. Suddenly, he just seemed to be there, between them. He shoved Fischer into a parked car, hit Susan before she could react. Fischer heard the blows land, heard her gasp in pain and shock.

"You'd better fuck off, little man," Chris said to him. Susan was doubled over, panting, trying to catch her breath. He caught her by the hair and by the right arm and dragged her toward the alley.

"No—" Fischer could barely hear himself. His voice seemed to be trapped in his throat. He slumped against the car, stunned. "Don't—"

He couldn't move. He couldn't speak. He couldn't breathe. Tears were filling his eyes.

And then, like flame through the fear: rage.

White-hot, cleansing. Clarifying.

"_No—!_"

He pushed away from the car, became a juggernaut. Propelled himself at Chris's disappearing back, as the shadows of the alley swallowed him and Susan. It was as if he could smell the man's blood. It was as if he could _taste_ it.

Chris must have heard the scuffling footsteps behind him. He shoved Susan away. She hit the alley wall—

A frozen moment: She hit the alley wall, and her head snapped back, and Fischer heard a cracking sound. Heard. Or thought he heard. Susan hit the alley wall, her head snapped back, and she was slumping toward the dirty pavement, her eyes not closed but open—

— and Fischer hit Chris, one fist, two, right to the face, furious. Furious but untrained, earnest but unskilled. The next blow went wide, as Chris ducked and blocked, but before he could counterattack, Fischer grabbed him. He wanted the man's throat, his fucking _eyes_. They grappled in the alley, slammed each other against the walls. Their fight propelled them back toward the street. A lucky shove, or an unlucky trip, and Chris stumbled out across the sidewalk, into the traffic lane. He, like Fischer, heard the roar of a car engine, the guttural shriek of hard-braking tires.

Chris looked to his right, into the glare of headlamps in motion.

#####

A solid, crunching _thump_.

#####

#####

Chris jolted awake. Wide-eyed, gasping.

"I hate coming out like that," Susan was saying. She was wincing, rubbing her temples, while Nick gently drew the needle from her wrist.

Chris took a deep breath, released it, relaxing, reorienting himself. "Well, I think I just got hit by Fischer's fucking limo, so I win."

"He's already learning," Nick said. "Adapting."

"It was chance," Chris countered. "You cooked up sidewalks that were too narrow, and I got too close to the road." He looked toward Fischer, still lying unconscious on the sofa. "Come on: I'd say we've got about a minute. Get him up."

#####

Fischer woke when he nearly fell out of his chair.

He was where he had been: sitting at his desk, reviewing stats and reports, taking notes. All three of his monitors were alive with screensavers: swirling galaxies of stars that resolved themselves into the Fischer-Morrow corporate logo against a deep blue background before flying apart again. The mug by his right hand was empty. He'd finished his coffee and fallen asleep.

His left wrist itched where the robber had pulled off his watch the night before. He scratched, examined. A series of tiny rips in the skin, where the metallic segments of the watchband had snagged and pulled free. Several of them, one especially, were fine enough to resemble insect bites.

Or needle marks.

#####

#####


	3. Chapter 3

**A/N:** Thanks for the comments, folks. Most humbly: thanks, and thanks again. Took a short block of vacation this last week, so here's a bonus block o' stuff. The plot thickens, sickens, ignores its GPS, and veers toward Weirdville. Enjoy!

#####

#####

He was sore but content, exhausted but relaxed. He was falling slowly without moving. Darkness all around, but no chill. He could feel himself breathing.

He could feel her touching him. Susan Gaumont. The girl from Gilliam's.

She whispered, close enough for him to feel the warmth of her breath on his ear: "Will you keep me safe?"

#####

There was a woman in his bedroom but not in his bed.

It was Therese, moving about the room, picking a rumpled t-shirt from the floor, a pair of gray boxer shorts, too, drawing the blinds against fading daylight. Severe-faced Therese, who said, when she saw that Fischer's eyes were not only open but at least semi-consciously watching her: "Browning sent me."

Browning once had plans regarding the woman who was Fischer's personal assistant. Said plans dropped flaming into a cold ocean of disappointment at an all-staff holiday party two years back, when Therese had shown up, laughing and chummy, with an attractive woman about her age, said age falling reasonably between forty-five and a decade beyond. "What a waste," Browning had muttered, taking his alpha-male terror of lesbians and retreating into a bottle of scotch. Fischer found out later that the woman was, in fact, Therese's sister. He hadn't bothered to tell Browning.

Presently, Fischer blinked away sleep and asked: "What time is it?"

"You're perfectly capable of telling time, Robert."

He rolled on to his side, checked the clock on his nightstand. The numbers stated, factual black against ethereal blue, that it was six-fifteen. He rolled back unbelieving, stared up at the ivory-white ceiling. Normally, he never overslept. It had to be the pain pills.

Therese was still on the move. She called, from the vastness of the closet: "You've forgotten, haven't you? Tonight?"

Fischer watched her emerge with a shirt and a suit, still on their hangers, watched her feather them out like a toreador unfurling a cape and lay them across the unrumpled acreage at the foot of his bed. She had once been a daring beauty, if not a great one. Compact build, blonde hair she still wore shoulder-length and tousled, classically Dresden-blue eyes. Erosion had had its way with her features but not her energy.

"You're the calendar, Therese, not me," he said. His day was coming back to him. Late last night, he'd finally taken Browning's advice and come home and collapsed. Early this morning, he'd called in excuses for his lack of physical presence in the office and had worked from home. "Work" obviously had transmuted to "sleep."

"Up," Therese replied, and yanked the bedclothes off him.

"Oh, for God's sake—"

He might have been stark naked. No: he _was_ stark naked.

Therese didn't even raise an eyebrow. "Late-afternoon indulgences, Robert? Not your usual style."

She wasn't looking at him, but not out of modesty. She'd seen him nude before. Fischer followed her line of sight. There was a body-shaped indentation in the sheet beside him.

"There was no one here," he said, half to himself.

Therese _tsked_, shooed him onto his feet and toward the shower. "You might want to have a word with your housekeeping service, then."

At the door of the master bathroom, Fischer turned to see her pick a long dark hair off the pillow next to his.

"What is it I'm forgetting, Therese?" he asked, hollowly.

Now she was raiding his dresser for fresh shorts and socks. "The gala opening of the new wing at the Berryman Museum of Modern Art. The wing for which Fischer-Morrow, Unlimited, has so generously paid." She added, as she augmented her pillaging with a clean white undershirt: "You're giving the opening address, but you've forgotten that, too. Right?"

So much for his father wanting him to stay hidden. "Oh, Christ."

"A prayer. Should go over well with the godless heathens and unwashed masses."

Fischer went numbly off to shower. As he did, Therese moved her campaign to the kitchen. While Fischer washed, dried, dressed, he could hear her poking about in the refrigerator and the cupboards, a slither of metal, a brisk whisking. She had a glass of grapefruit juice and an egg-white omelet with toast plated for him on the breakfast bar before he'd finished with his cufflinks.

"I won't have you drinking on an empty stomach," she said.

#####

An architect a handful of years back had suffered ("undergone" being far too soft a term) an epiphany regarding the use of hammered aluminum alloy as an exterior building material. He, she, or it had simultaneously seemingly rebelled against the use of the plumb line. Most tragically, he (for brevity's sake) had captured the imagination of the governing board of the Museum of Contemporary Art and, subsequently, the pocketbooks of a number of extremely wealthy patrons of the arts. The end result was the Berryman Museum of Modern Art, the lights from the city and the harbor catching eerily in its pocked metal skin, looking not unlike a steel-cast pile of shopping bags abandoned next to the MCA on the Sydney Harbor foreshore.

Armored with but a single glass of champagne, Fischer put on what Therese labeled his "grown-up voice," consciously deep and clear and slightly superior, and from a lectern placed at the open run of steps leading to the displays on the museum's first floor bluffed his way through the speech he'd scrawled on the too-short ride over. He took cold comfort from three simple facts: one half of his audience wrote him off as a faceless wallet speaking on behalf of an evil, but rich and gullible, corporation; the second half saw him simply as an idiot mouthpiece for the culturally pretentious; and both halves, together, wanted nothing more than to get to the bar and the hors d'oeuvres.

"Well, that was absolutely terrible," said Terry Ellis, waiting, with a wry dimpled smile and two glasses of champagne, when the applause had smattered away to a murmur of conversation and the exodus for the bar and the art had begun. "Christ. What _did_ you do to your face?"

The shock in his tone was honest. As he took the second glass of champagne, Fischer looked at Ellis reassuringly. He had a circle of friends. A joke: it was much more a circling than a circle. Junior boardmen, young business types of about his age, like ramoras sticking close to a shark, sycophantic, looking for a spot to latch on and feed. All except for Ellis, with whom Fischer had hashed through most of his degree in chemical engineering at university: Ellis, with his spark-fed blue eyes and the reckless curling of his red-brown hair, whom Browning, with a snort, had written off as a gay crush.

"If you'll recall, I'm a rich man, Terry. I hired someone to do it for me."

"Don't fuck about, Rob."

"I was mugged."

"The hell you were."

"No. Really." He recounted the experience as they went up to the exhibit, made a mildly gruesome joke out of the attack, his mistaken arrest, his boorish handlers at the police station. Details regarding Susan he mostly failed to mention. He left her name out entirely.

If Susan Gaumont was really her name at all.

#####

The irony, certainly intentional, was that at least half of the new wing was given over to the works of some communist or socialist or militant environmentalist, whose name Ellis provided and which name the champagne seemed to erase simultaneously from Fischer's memory, male and late-thirtyish and thin, stereotypically dressed all in black, with a pinched face and a perpetual glower, who looked death at Fischer and his filthy rich industrialist-capitalist ilk throughout the evening. Another man, another artist, Fischer assumed, much like the first, moved quietly through the displays, black-haired and thin all in black, too, watching the patrons with strangely pale hazel eyes.

"Most of his works are recycled, or recyclable, or edible, or something like that." Ellis spoke almost at a whisper. He and Fischer were standing, fresh glasses in hand, with man the first's deathly stare trained at their backs from a no-miss distance of less than fifteen feet, before a piece that looked, neither more nor less, and much like the Berryman itself, like a mismeasured pile of cardboard packing boxes. "The ideas are certainly recycled."

Fischer chuckled into his champagne, drained his glass.

#####

He ate what his nutritionists told him to eat, allowed them to mold him into an indifferent vegetarian. He let his physical trainers put him through his paces. He grudgingly lifted weights. He enjoyed running and swimming.

But drinking was his. He wondered sometimes, as he approached intoxication, if this was how his mother had felt as the cancer dragged her closer to the abyss. A feeling they might somehow share, from opposite sides of the grave.

#####

He was an inscrutable drunk. A mysterious drunk. He could hide impairment with great skill behind his too-clear eyes, or so he told himself. So, perhaps, without quite realizing it, he'd had one or several too many when he spotted her. The girl from Gilliam's.

#####

She, like the second man, was moving quietly through the exhibits. She wore a calf-length black dress that touched her without clinging and left her arms bare; her dark hair was loose against her shoulders and back. For a moment, Fischer watched her from beyond the reach of the champagne and found himself holding his breath.

Ellis had set off, finally suitably fortified by alcohol, to tell their nameless glaring socialist-communist-treehugger what he thought of the man's "art." Fischer was abandoned. More truly, he might have been lost. He approached her obliquely, in casual nearing passes, until he was face to face with her by one of the room's siege windows, narrow and high, a blue-black rectangle of lingering twilight cut into the powder white of the wall, and found he had nothing to say.

She watched him with a slightly wary frown. She seemed to have cracked the code of his initial maneuvering; now, it appeared, she was waiting for his next move.

Fischer cleared his throat. "Hello."

"Hello." She might have been assessing the damage to his face. Aside from suspicion, her expression was unreadable. At least by Fischer's present powers of alcohol-filtered comprehension.

"I, umm—" he said.

She waited, not replying.

Fischer tried to work his mind clear of the funk of the champagne. "You're in some kind of trouble, aren't you?" he said, finally.

"Pardon me?" Realization dawned in her blue eyes even as her frown solidified. "Oh, no. No. If it's about the other night, I have witnesses. Whatever it is you did to your face, I only spilled a drink on you. Which you deserved, by the way. I never laid a finger on you."

He felt as if they were shouting at one another, though they were speaking at the murmur that seemed to be intrinsic to the room. He felt as if he were that close to losing her, to seeing her walk away. He continued, almost desperately: "I have resources. I can protect you."

Now her frown was incredulous. "From what, Mr. Fischer?"

"His name is Chris, isn't it?"

"Who? What are you talking about? Why am I even asking—?" She glanced at the glass in Fischer's hand. _You're drunk,_ her glance said. "Enjoy the art, Mr. Fischer."

She walked away. Fischer went after her. A second before he touched her arm, as if she could sense the static between his skin and hers, she turned.

To her borderline-offended stare, he tried not to blurt: "No, no, no: wait. Please. You can trust me—"

"Because you're a billionaire? Or because you're paranoid? Why would you want to protect me, Mr. Fischer?"

"Because—"

_Because I'm a rich spoiled bastard, and I'm drunk enough to make an ass of myself with a woman I hardly know._

"Should I ask again, Mr. Fischer? Why would you feel a need to protect me?"

_Because I've seen your file. Your private information._

He shook his head. "I have no idea." _Because you're in my dreams._ "I've had too much to drink, and I'm behaving badly. Please accept my apologies, Miss—"

She just looked at him with emotionally flatlined eyes.

Fischer squared his shoulders. "Forgive me. Good night."

He moved away, fully intending to say his farewells to Ellis, or whatever might remain of Ellis after his showdown with their death-stare artist, before having Phil drive him home. He was less than half a dozen steps onto his chosen path when she said: "Wait. Mr. Fischer, wait."

Now it was his turn to turn back. To his credit, he did so without stumbling. Which she might have noticed: she smiled slightly as she re-approached. "I'm sorry," she said. "That was rude of me."

"Not at all." Her eyes on him were a bit too honest. By way of escape, Fischer smiled ruefully at the glass in his hand. "I'm more of a lightweight than I care to admit."

She chuckled; tension loosened from her shoulders. Fischer asked, maybe a moment sooner than he should: "What are you doing here?"

"I could tell you it's none of your business. But, as you're likely to pester me until I confess: remember, Mr. Fischer, I _do_ work for a private security firm."

On cue, she tipped her head slightly to the right, slipped fingertips discreetly beneath the dark fall of her hair. For the first time, Fischer saw that she was wearing an earpiece.

"Speak of the devil—" This, murmured, to Fischer. To the air before her, she said: "Right. I'm on my way." She smoothed her hair, looked back at him with genuine apology. "Will you excuse me, Mr. Fischer?"

"It's Robert. Rob, if you like."

"Robert." She smiled for him. She laid one hand for a moment on his arm, the other against his bruised cheek. She leaned up and tenderly kissed the damaged corner of his mouth. Fischer turned his head, met her in the kiss, fully and deeply. She didn't pull away.

"For chivalry," she said, softly, when it ended, when Fischer once again had full possession of his mouth, a fresh sting in his stitches that he didn't mind a bit. "However paranoid, however misguided." Her eyes on his were star-bright. She might have been looking directly into his skull. "My name is Susan, by the way."

She walked away. He watched her go, feeling, in his intoxication, in, too, the early, easy stages of arousal, a comfortable, dreamlike paralysis. A sense that he couldn't call her back even if he tried, but that, for now, it really didn't matter. He could taste her kiss.

#####

He didn't dream at all that night. Nothing that he remembered, anyway.

#####

The next day, exercised, showered, shaved, as precise as a knife in a steel-gray suit, he was back to work in his office. Three minutes after he arrived, Browning walked in. He had a data pad in his hand. He set it on Fischer's desk, turned it so that, for Fischer, the headlines of the _Morning Herald _were right-side-up, and said, in summary, before Fischer could read or ask:

"There was a theft at the museum last night."

His index finger, Fischer saw, was half-obscuring the article in question. "At the Berryman—?"

"No. Not that garbage in the new wing. Something they were storing over the main building." Browning moved his hand; Fischer read.

It was a gem-encrusted copy of the Koran. For a century it had lain in the wreck of the _Titanic_. The actual bloody _Titanic_. Fourteen thousand feet below the surface of an ocean ten thousand miles away. Lying wrapped in premium oilskin, encased in a lead-lined safe and pitch darkness, until the day, only months ago, when millions of dollars' worth of technology and determination had returned it to the light. It had been in storage at the CMA pending display at the museum, one stop in an exultant global touring. Now it was gone.

Still, it had little to do with the running of a prime energy conglomerate. Fischer looked up at Browning questioningly.

"She was there last night, wasn't she, Robert?"

Fischer thought he could feel his pulse slowing. "Yes. Why?"

"I'd like that file back, Robert."

"File—?"

"The folder. The one I left in here yesterday."

He was standing too close. Looming. Fischer pushed back from his desk, stood, walked toward the windows. His voice was flat: "She told me she worked for a private security firm."

"Sure as hell wasn't doing her job, then, was she?"

"No," Fischer said, slowly, to the cumulo-strati near enough to touch, "she wasn't doing her job at all."

She had never told him for certain, outside of a dream, what she did for a living. There was no "remember" about it. He realized that now. He put fingertips to the cool glass, felt the draw of the four-hundred-foot drop four inches beyond.

Behind him, Browning said: "This has gone far enough, Robert. We need to turn that file over to the police."

"So turn it over, Uncle Peter." Fischer turned to face Browning. "If that's what you're so determined to do: turn it over."

"You don't understand, Robert. _That_ file, _that_ folder. The one I left in here yesterday. There was only the one hard copy; the morons in Security had it stored out on their server, and now that server is down with bad blocks. Bad fucking blocks." Browning scratched his temple in frustration; Fischer watched impassively. "Programming is running data recovery right now, but you know how it is: first you have to convince them that you didn't kill the entire fucking system with something you downloaded from Pepe's House of Bargain Shareware, then they spend six hours playing dumb, and then they'll let you know when there's an E.T.A._ If_ there's an E.T.A."

Fischer returned to his desk, tapped the comm button. "Nancy, would you come in here, please?"

Nancy Crawford entered a second later from the door leading to the reception room of Fischer's office, early middle-aged, dark-haired, slate-eyed, solid and formal in a charcoal-gray suit-dress. In the Fischer-Morrow executive pantheon of office gods, she was Stability, the immovable object to Browning's unstoppable force. She halted precisely six feet from Fischer's desk.

He asked: "Did you clean anything off my desk yesterday, Nancy? Before I arrived today?"

"No, Mr. Fischer."

Prompted Browning, from the side: "No tidying-up? No impromptu filing?"

She kept her eyes on Fischer. "If you'd tell me what you were looking for, Mr. Fischer—"

"A black plastic folder."

"No, sir. I haven't seen anything like that." She gave Browning a look like winter granite. _See how easy it_ is _sans sarcasm, Mr. Browning?_

"Thank you, Nancy."

"You're welcome, Mr. Fischer."

"If it means as much as you think it does, I'm surprised you can't quote the contents of that file from memory, Uncle Peter," Fischer said, after Nancy had gone.

"I have a head for numbers and statistics, Robert. Not for names, addresses: hell, that's what my PDA is for, isn't it?"

Fischer tried. He tried to keep his expression neutral, his face still. He could feel her fingers on his cheek. He could _taste_ her.

_Will you keep me safe?_

"Yes," he said, softly. He found himself turning again from Browning, suppressing a smirk.

Browning saw. He took a deep breath, breathed it out. Then he came closer. Close enough that Fischer took an involuntary step back.

"Chivalry is a bullshit concept, Robert," Browning said quietly. "An unviable concept. For reasons that should be obvious to a man of integrity and intelligence, it is well and truly dead." His tone, like his expression, bespoke suspicion, anger, and, most terribly, disappointment. "We are dealing with criminals here. You might want to keep that in mind."

He walked out, leaving Fischer to cloud-shadowed silence, early morning light.

#####

#####

#####


	4. Chapter 4

The clouds united, condensed, turned to fog. It wrapped around the upper floors of the world headquarters of Fischer-Morrow, pressed itself like nebulous gray lint against the window-walls. Said obfuscation, thought Fischer, was an apt physical metaphor for conditions on the executive floor: the programming staff had to stage a roving series of outages in the mainframe while they tried to isolate the problem that had led to the loss of data on Security's server; consequently, the entire staff watched their productivity stagger about in fits and starts while their frustration rose, and Browning had yet to recover his lost file on Susan Gaumont. Her physical file, that now-mysterious black plastic folder, was, of course, nowhere to be found. Browning, quietly fuming, stayed away or terse and attended meetings with an almighty impassive scowl, which left the remainder of the attendees from accounting and strategic planning practically tongue-tied: they were so accustomed to having him commandeer their gatherings that, left with Browning leaned back as grim as basalt in his back-corner-left-at-the-table chair, from which he could, like a Mafia bodyguard, watch both the proceedings and the door, they found themselves with nearly nothing to say. Across the executive floor, the lighting adjusted automatically to counter the gloom outside, but by the end of the day it seemed the building had inverted and that Fischer was now a hundred meters under, rather than above, the ground, a dweller in a muffled netherworld. Briefcase in hand at six o' clock, he nearly caught himself pressing the "UP" button to summon the lift.

He took the long way home from the office. A drive out where he could could glimpse the setting sun as it dropped lower than the unbroken gray stratum of cloud, where he could watch the path of molten light spreading briefly across the dark water of the harbor. Back at his flat, he left his briefcase on the desk in his open office space, continued through to his bedroom. He hung his suit, dropped his dress shirt into the laundry hamper; he put on an ash-gray sweatshirt and softly worn jeans and proceeded back out to the kitchen, where he chopped carrots and apples and celery and fed the chunks into the juicer. Too much stillness around him after all the day's muffling at the office: he summoned Alicia de Laroccha from the stereo, let the filigree of the Granados _Goyescas_ weave through the flat; he seated himself on the sueded-leather alcove sofa, sipped his juice, put his head back, closed his eyes. Then, wanting one last look at the terms of a regional demand forecast before going down to the pool for a swim, he got up, crossed to his office space to fetch his data pad from his briefcase. The flat was becoming stuffy as the heating and air conditioning negotiated the transition from gloomy day to chilly overcast night; he took the briefcase out onto the balcony, laid it on the glass top of the patio table, opened it.

It might have been an Eastern Brown Snake for the shock he felt.

The black plastic folder was there in his briefcase.

As thunder rumbled from the southwest, Fischer reached with shaking fingers to open it. A second shock, like a miniature lighting-strike, passed through him.

Susan Gaumont's file was no longer under the opaque black cover. He found, instead, a newsprint clipping from that day's _Morning Herald_: another article about that missing Koran. Below it he saw, in the window-filtered light from the flat's living area, newsprint practically rust-yellow. The paper flaked at the edges as he picked it up. It was an old trade ad, dateless, sourceless, for a warehousing firm on the harbor. A grainy photograph of a five-story brick building looming, solid and reliable-looking, beyond the docks, at the water's edge. The copy below read in hand-set type: _Secure Storage. You Will Be Safe with Us._

Fischer frowned._ Will you keep me safe?_

A drop of water fell on the newsprint. It was starting to rain. Fischer tried to brush the water away. Then another drop struck the paper, another after that. Fischer watched as a drop replaced the _a_ in _Safe_ with a smear like a bullet hole. The copy was beginning to blur. Another low growl of thunder, followed by a definite, continuous pattering. Fischer closed the folder, his briefcase. Then, as the rain began to fall in earnest, he sensed someone standing behind him, to his right.

He turned, the back of his neck prickling, to see his reflection in his bedroom window. Or _was_ it his reflection? The shape in the dark glass was human, roughly his size. Night and the rain were obscuring the details. Still holding the old trade ad, he approached the window, reached out with his free hand, touched the glass. The reflection reached out, too. Maybe a second too slowly. Fischer eased closer—

A silent burst of light. Lightning. Fischer found himself staring into eyes like, but not, his. A woman's face. He jumped back, startled, propelled by a concussion of thunder, even as he felt raindrops now drumming the paper in his hand. He looked down, away from the window, and saw that the old newsprint wasn't just blurring now; the page was actually being washed clean. He wiped desperately at the water with the edge of his free hand.

"_No_—"

He started awake. Rain was pelting his face. He'd dozed off with the alcove window open.

He could see his briefcase from where he sat. It was there on the edge of his desk, right where he'd left it when he arrived home from work. He boosted himself up off the sofa and went to it. His heart still dream-pounding, he opened it.

The black plastic folder was inside.

He felt as though Browning were there in the flat, watching him with his basilisk scowl.

"Impossible," Fischer said, to the empty room, to Browning's accusing shade. He opened the cover of the folder. Susan Gaumont once again looked back at him in digital color. He feathered through the pages below. Details of her service career, her potential affiliations and doings since then. A possible address in Sydney. No old warehouse ads.

_Wait._

The ad. _You Will Be Safe with Us. _He looked away from Susan's file, focused instead, inwardly, on what he'd seen in the dream.

"Will you keep me safe?" he whispered, seeing in his mind not only the warehouse pictured in browned and crumbling newsprint but the same warehouse, or one nearly like it, as it existed in fact. He'd seen it in real life. He'd passed it, at a distance, on his way to the office.

Had Robert Fischer been a decade, even five years, older, he might have called Browning or the police. An older Robert Fischer, a more experienced, jaded Robert Fischer, might even have put an end to the whole mysterious, irritating mess by feeding the folder and its contents wholesale into the heavy-duty paper shredder that stood beside his desk.

This Robert Fischer, young, clear-eyed, confounded, closed the folder and his briefcase. He took the keys to his Jaguar and left the flat.

#####

Through another's concern, he had a torch in the car. Fischer, half-American as he was, tended to think of it as a flashlight; Phil, his faithful driver, who knew his employer's predilection for solo night-time trips to the middle of nowhere, had packed for the XF a breakdown kit, which included, along with basic medical supplies, a blanket, an old-style pry-bar, and other things, a black-barreled Maglite nearly the length of Fischer's forearm. His destination now, the building supposedly from his dream, was a warehouse on the north side of the harbor, on the waterfront, that had so far been passed over for conversion into high-end condos most likely either because of a zoning stalemate or questions regarding toxic-substances remediation. He left the highway; he navigated and finally passed beyond sidestreets to wasteland; he drove slowly across muddy rough ground, trying to be mindful of rocks, glass, jagged chunks of of brick and scrap. The building that might have been the warehouse in his yellowed imagined ad, five stories high by the line-count of broken black windows in its dirty brick side, seemed, from Fischer's angle of approach, like a monstrous ancient animal glancing over its shoulder at an interloper who was seconds away from becoming its dinner. Thirty yards from the warehouse, he came to a chain-link fence topped with a triple stranding of barbed wire. He put the car in park. He took the Maglite from the emergency kit in the boot. After a moment's hesitation, he took the pry bar, too. He killed the engine and the headlamps, locked the Jaguar's doors. He moved cautiously along the fence, passing signs warning of condemnation and danger, telling him, likely wisely, to KEEP OUT, the flashlight on but its beam angled only as high as was necessary for him to see—

—_there_—

—a break, a gap, really, worn by runoff and rutting, between the ground and the bottom of the chain-link. He reached it and hesitated. The rain beat a chilling tattoo on his hair and shoulders, dribbled at his collar, pocked the mud at his feet. Across the harbor, the city lights sparkled unreal through a million falling drops. The whole situation was unreal. He told himself, as he wriggled, flinching, through the muck and snags of the gap at the bottom of the fence, that this was the most foolish thing he had ever done.

He repeated to himself, silently, as he approached the warehouse's near wall, the mantra of his stupidity: _What the hell am I doing here?_

Set in the rain-slimed grimy brick fifteen feet from the corner of the wall, he found a rust-marked steel door. The handle turned; the original lock had been cored out.

But a bright new padlock on a shiny new hasp held the door firmly shut.

Fischer at first felt profound relief: he was locked out; his foolishness had been thwarted; he could claim to have made a good-faith effort that had been honorably— and legally— stymied. He could go home to a hot shower, clean, dry clothes, and dinner.

But he found himself looking at the lock, comparing its newness to the age of the door and the brick exterior of the warehouse. The metal signs on the fence surrounding the building were faded, corroded at their white edges. The ostensible owners of the property hadn't been near the place for some time.

He braced the pry bar between the padlock and the hasp and pushed. With a metallic creak and a localized shattering of masonry, the lock gave way.

Fischer opened the door, took a deep breath, and stepped inside.

#####

The air smelled of dust, of old oil and diesel, over a saltwater tang. No sound but the rain, striking the glass of what had to have been grime-obscured skylights high overhead. No light, save that from the Maglite. No derelicts, no junkies, no graffiti, no guttering campfires. Someone, not just the fresh lock, had kept the place free of intruders. Someone, or some_thing_. Fischer thought the latter word and wished he hadn't. He stood for a moment in the black stillness while a shudder ran between his chilled shoulderblades. He told himself that he needed to move quickly but carefully; he needed to keep a clear head. Where would a safe be in such a place? In the back, most likely, in the offices.

He set off across the warehouse floor, his shoes striking in the dark at bits of debris, a muffling of dust. About midway, he began to feel a give underfoot, a sponginess, heard a soft splash practically below his feet. He shone the Maglite straight down, saw cracks between thick wooden boards. The light through the gaps struck off something black, glistening, shifting: he was standing above water. Likely he was traversing a boat slip, since covered over, that had allowed small craft direct access into the warehouse. He moved as lightly as he could across the rotting wood, his gut anticipating a splinter-and-crack with every step; he sighed with shaking relief when he again felt dusty concrete beneath his soles.

Beyond the boat slip lay an iron topiary of abandoned machinery, dismantled pieces of crane, derrick, gantry, most man-high or taller. Fischer made his way through, cautious of juttings and metal edges rusted but still sharp, and found himself at the far end of the warehouse. A brick wall rose before him; a run of metal steps was bolted to it; thirty feet above Fischer's head, the steps terminated at a railed catwalk, also wall-bolted, that fronted a row of four empty doorframes. The offices. Fischer ascended slowly, testing the corroded mesh of the steps as he went; he reached the top without incident. He shone the Maglite in at the doors nearest the top of the steps, right and then left, saw nothing but dust, floorboards, and brick. The third office, the one farthest to the left, was empty, too.

In the fourth office, at the far cornering of the brick walls, stood a black safe.

Fischer crossed the floorboards of the office as cautiously as he'd crossed the boat slip, imagining dry rot above as much as wet rot below. No tracks in the dust on the floor, no scrapings, either, as the safe might have made had it recently been wheeled or dragged into place. Fischer dropped to his haunches before it. The coating of dust on the safe's top was powder-smooth and even; the safe itself looked very old. A single circular numbered combination dial on its front, a steel handle, its horizontal length curved into a gentle ornamental _S_. Fischer reached out, grasped the handle, pushed.

It swung downward with a soft click. Fischer, surprised, tugged the handle outward. The door opened; with his heartbeat shaking his sternum, he shone the Maglite inside.

Nothing. Nothing but dust motes swimming in the glare of the torch. The safe was empty. Of course it was.

Then he noticed the crack. The Maglite's intense beam of light was striking a shadow, no more than an eighth of an inch high, between the ceiling of the safe's interior and the top of its back panel. Fischer looked more closely, saw an actual gap between the two.

The back panel of the safe was false.

Fischer set the Maglite, still pointed toward the safe, on the floor. The crack was too narrow for his fingertips to find purchase: he hooked the pry bar into the gap and pulled. The panel gave way, fell forward. Something fell from the back of the safe on top of it. Something rectangular, wrapped in fine opaque plastic. Something about the size of a standard hardcover bestseller.

Fischer traded the pry bar for the Maglite. He peeled packing tape from one corner of the rectangular something, carefully pulled back the plastic, and froze.

Gilt-edged pages. Golden leather binding. A sparkling of emeralds, rubies, sapphires. The lost Koran seemed to give off its own glow.

Fischer found himself holding his breath as he re-wrapped the exposed corner. Then, as he began to remove the book from the safe, he found himself drawing back. Hesitating.

If he returned the Koran to the Museum of Contemporary Art, the action would be suspicious at best, scandal-worthy at worst. If he turned the book in at a police station, he— and, by extension, his father and Fischer-Morrow— faced the potential for even more scandal. Furthermore, he would practically be admitting complicity in the book's disappearance: old man Maurice's spoiled drunk of a son having a lark. (He could imagine his custodial interview as conducted by Detective Sergeant Monroe, a mild frown on the man's broad face, skepticism in his shale-like eyes: "And how, exactly, did you know where the missing item was to be found, Mr. Fischer...?") Even leaving the book unannounced posed a risk— hell, given the omnipresence of CCTV cameras, anonymity within fifty yards of a police station was a myth.

He would make an anonymous phone call. Not from his cell, which he knew would be traceable and which, he only just realized, was still in the breast pocket of his suit jacket, hanging in the closet back at his flat. He'd leave this dark and dangerous place; he'd find a pay phone—

Behind him, a sound. A soft scuttling.

Rats, likely. If only slightly, Fischer relaxed. Though what rats might find to eat in a place like this was a question he was loath to consider. He tipped the Koran carefully back on edge, re-concealed it behind the false back wall of the safe. He stood.

From outside the office, from the graveyard of machinery below the steel steps, came a short, sharp _ping _of metal on concrete. Something had fallen.

Or something had been knocked loose.

_Someone was down there._

He knew the light from the torch gave away his location; he didn't dare turn it off. He gripped the pry bar like a club; he left the office; made his way quickly down the steps. At the bottom, he stopped dead: to his right, at an angle from the steps, stood the dark shape of a man.

"Keep back," Fischer barked, his voice sounding choked and yet far too loud in the cavernous stillness. "I'm armed."

As he spoke, he swung the beam of the Maglite in the man's direction.

And no one was there. A headache ball on a length of cable, hanging at a right angle to the beams of a segment of gantry. Nothing more.

But fear had taken root in his mind. He had to fight to keep himself from running for the door through which he'd entered this rotting dark nightmare. When he was back safely across the punked boards of the boat slip, when the outer door still proved to be open and passable, he bolted into the rainy night. He ran at rabbit-speed for the fence, squeezed back under it, reached the Jaguar without turning an ankle or slipping in the mud.

He unlocked the driver's-side door, opened it.

"Wait," he panted. In semi-panic and thorough paranoia, he suddenly shone the Maglite into the back seat. No one was there. No one was in the passenger seat, either.

But in the second before he got in, he heard, artificially muffled to distance by the rain, a creaking followed by a solid, final _clang_. Fischer knew, without looking, without testing the limits of the Maglite's powerful beam, what that sound signified: though there was hardly any wind, the door into the warehouse was once again closed.

He belted himself into the driver's seat, started the Jaguar, and drove away across the muddy debris-strewn wasteground as quickly as he dared.

#####

His heart was still overstepping its beat when he pulled into a Coles Express to implement the next stage of his plan. The station, a low white-block convenience store fronted by four petrol pumps sheltered against the rain under a red peaked awning, had a pay phone affixed to its side. Fischer parked the Jaguar in one of the spots adjacent to the store, at the edge of the oasis of sterile light cast by the rows of bulbs on the awning's underside, and got out. He had the receiver of the phone uncradled in his hand when he realized two things: the entire area, as noted by a sign above the nearest petrol pump, was under video surveillance. And he had no change. In fact, he couldn't remember the last time he'd handled a coin— or, for that matter, whether he had, in fact, ever touched a coin in his entire life.

_Right_.

He hooked the receiver back in the cradle. Forty-five cents the phone wanted: fine. Fischer entered the convenience store, walked to the cooler cases at the back, and selected a plastic bottle of Coke. On his way to the check-out counter, he picked, at random, also, a packet of crisps from a crowded metal rack. He set crisps and bottle on the counter before the clerk, a skinny young ginger indifferently paging through an issue of _Wired_; beside his would-be purchases Fischer placed, like an offering, a fresh twenty-dollar bill from the wallet he'd— thank God— remembered to bring.

The clerk didn't quite look up from an article on corporate security innovations in the age of artificial intelligence. "Will that be all?"

He had to be asking Fischer. There were no cars at the petrol pumps. They were alone in the store. "Yes," Fischer replied. His voice came out as a hoarse whisper. He cleared his throat, repeated, he hoped, casually: "Yes. That's all."

The clerk glanced at the money and the goods, took a look longer and oblique but somehow far more direct at Fischer himself. Who was, Fischer only then realized, standing before him covered in dust and mud under the all-seeing glare of the overheads. Who no doubt looked at least half as nervous as he felt.

The clerk scanned Fischer's purchases, muttered a total that dropped without impact into Fischer's ears, took the twenty, and offered him in return worn polymer notes and an assortment of coins. Fischer pocketed the notes, kept the coins like talismans in his hand, turned for the glass door of the exit.

"Forgetting something, sir—?" said the clerk.

_'This is a robbery,' perhaps—? _Fischer appended for him, silently, as he returned to the counter, sheepishly, for his Coke and crisps.

#####

Mindful of the cameras, even more mindful that much of the CCTV system around the city had recently been upgraded with nightvision tech, Fischer kept his head down while he phoned the police. He checked the list of local services numbers posted next to the phone and dialed straight through to the nearest station; to a desk sergeant who sounded like the clone of the desk sergeant three nights ago in Surry Hills, he gave the location of the missing Koran, described in precise detail its location within that dark and rotting warehouse. And when the man asked, with open suspicion, how Fischer had come to possess such information, Fischer replied, with clear and sudden daring, "My name is Chris. I'm the bastard who stole it from the Museum of Contemporary Art.", and hung up.

#####

His confidence dimmed on the drive home, as he drew, dry-mouthed now, on the bottle of Coke; adrenaline faded into exhaustion. By the time he reached his flat, he wanted nothing more than a shower and his dinner.

Both of which would have to wait. He heard a bell-like chiming as he opened the door. The sound was coming from his office, more specifically from his Mac: someone from Fischer-Morrow had sent him an executive-priority message.

Fischer moused his monitor awake, clicked over to his in-box. He read the sender's identity and felt himself go absolutely still.

The message was from him, from his work computer.

The chiming stopped as he opened the e-mail. Fischer read silently, only the sound of his breathing in the stillness of his flat: _Meet us here. You've lost us the book. Bring the file. Don't tell anyone. We have her._

#####

He took the time to change into a different sweatshirt. That was all. He was at Fischer-Morrow, the black folder in his briefcase, the briefcase beside him on the passenger seat of the Jaguar, in under twenty minutes.

The guard at the security desk in the main lobby, a mahogany high-walled dais centered in an expanse of dove-gray marble and clean-lined stainless-steel appointments, looked up as Fischer approached._ John Burns,_ Fischer thought, automatically, without needing to see the man's name tag. Fortyish Burns offered a smile from beneath his trim brown mustache. "Telecommuting not all it's cracked up to be, Mr. Fischer?" he asked, with cheerful nightshift informality. Fischer kept his expression coolly neutral as he wrote his signature in the light-box of the after-hours sign-in sheet.

"I forgot something," he said.

"Could've called for a runner, saved yourself a trip."

Fischer left the desk before Burns could see the nervous tic in his smile. "Was more than halfway here before I remembered I could do that, John," he called over his shoulder, en route to the platinum doors of the elevator bank.

#####

"Well," said Chris, "it's about fucking time."

He had a knife to Susan's throat. Something hooked, serrated, truly nasty looking. He and she were standing near the sofa in Fischer's office. They were both in jeans and practical lace-up boots; he wore a black sweatshirt, she a sensible crewneck sweater in deep-sea blue.

And he'd already cut her. Blood was trickling from a nick near her right jugular. A single drop, garnet-red, glistened jewel-like against the pale expanse of the carpeting at her feet.

"Did you tell the guard downstairs why you were here?" Chris asked, as Fischer moved farther into the office, as he realized, too, for the first time, that his tormentor spoke with an American accent. Not Southern, not from the coasts. A less-harsh Midwestern. Michigan, perhaps, or Ohio.

"No."

"Are you certain?"

Fischer was still looking at that drop of blood. Another joined it as he watched. When he raised his eyes to look at Chris and Susan, she shook her head slightly, nothing more than a twitch, really, as if she could see past his uncertainty to the fury building in him.

"Yes," Fischer replied, flatly.

"You've lost us that Koran, Mr. Fischer," Chris continued. "Now Miss Gaumont needs to become invisible again. Untraceable. The data on your company's server will not be recovered." He nodded toward Fischer's briefcase. "You have the only evidence of her existence right there in your hand."

"Robert, I'm sorry—" Susan said.

She was scowling back tears. Fischer met her eyes and said, calmly, words he knew were quite apt to be a lie: "Don't worry. It's going to be alright." He set the briefcase on the edge of his desk, glanced queryingly at Chris. "May I?"

"Open it."

Fischer opened his briefcase, removed the black plastic folder. He bent back the cover and held the folder so that Chris could see the contents without having to come closer. Then he re-closed his briefcase and placed the folder on top. "There. Now let her go."

"No copies, Mr. Fischer?"

"No."

"You're sure of that?

Fischer no longer bothered to hide his irritation. "Do I look like someone who frequents the Xerox room?"

Chris smiled at him with a barracuda's admiration. "You've got balls, you little bastard. I'll give you that."

He let Susan go. As he did, a man's voice said, over Fischer's left shoulder: "Pleasant dreams, Mr. Fischer."

Fischer realized he'd never clarified the components of the "we" in Chris's message. Before he could lash to the rear with an elbow, a man's hand placed something cloth-soft and moist over his nose and mouth. Fischer caught a single whiff of something sharp and sweet and felt his knees buckle.

#####

His body told him not to regain consciousness, at least not so soon; unwisely, he disregarded its advice. He was lying on his his side, his bruised cheek pressed into the sand-colored carpeting of his office. His skull throbbed in a way that suggested he'd abandoned the drinking of cheap vodka in favor of hitting himself in the head with the bottle; his unfed stomach was nauseous; the floor seesawed beneath him when he pulled himself up his desk to his feet.

He was alone. The folder was gone. He picked up the handset to his desk phone, heard nothing but silence; a second later, he saw the cut wire. His cell was still back in the pocket of his suit jacket, hanging in his bloody bedroom closet.

He took the lift back down to the main lobby. No one was at the security desk. The phone there was dead, too.

Fischer stepped back, frustrated, and shouted into the cool marble silence: "Hello—? Burns, are you there?"

His voice echoed in the lobby. There was no reply.

Fischer left the security desk, took the lift back down to the executive car park. He got in the Jaguar and drove toward an address in Surry Hills. An address he'd seen only in passing earlier that night in a file in a black plastic folder.

#####

Ironically, perhaps, her flat wasn't that far from Gilliam's. A three-story brick building on a tree-lined suburban street. Fischer found himself sitting with the Jaguar's engine and headlamps off across from the building's front entrance, watching, thinking, gathering his courage to do— what, exactly? The trip over from Fischer-Morrow had condensed in his mind until it became, for practical purposes, nonexistent; he frowned, knowing he owed his being here not only to sheer foolhardiness but to luck, the kindness— or road-skills— of strangers, and, possibly, advanced automotive engineering: he must have been the very model of a distracted driver.

He got out of the Jaguar, closed the door as soundlessly as possible, crossed the street. No buzz-in lock on the front glass door of the building; he entered, passed a wall, like a miniature mausoleum, of brass-doored post boxes. No name above the inlaid paper strip on which was typed the number 304, the number he saw in a file in his mind. There was a brown metal fire door beyond the row of post boxes; that door, too, was unlocked. Fischer passed through, found himself in a tight lobby of pale green walls and black-specked linoleum flooring. Stairs ahead. He took them at a run, three steps at a time.

#####

The walls of the third floor were parchment-white, not green; the linoleum of the lobby and stairway gave over to worn camel-colored carpeting. There were tall wood-frame windows, uncurtained, at either end of the floor. Fischer stood outside the door marked 304, not winded from his climb but breathless nonetheless. A voice in his head told him to turn around and walk back out the way he'd come, to forget her, Chris, the Koran, the whole insane business.

He raised his right hand and knocked.

An interminable three seconds, maybe five, maybe eight, while a task was abandoned, a room was crossed, the peephole was checked. Fischer heard the rattle of a door-chain, the slither of a deadbolt. The door opened, and he and Susan Gaumont stood face to face.

He wanted to be angry with her. He had every right to be. He wanted to feel hurt, used, betrayed. Then he saw the blood still seeping from the cut on her neck; he saw, too, a fresh bruise on her jaw, and he as much as blurted: "_Now_ will you let me protect you?"

She looked beyond him to the corridor, fear in her eyes; she fixed her eyes on him, then, almost helplessly, and ushered him into the flat. "Come in."

She closed the door behind herself and him. She turned and pressed herself shaking against him, and Fischer drew her into his arms and held her close.

"You can't be here," she whispered. "He's coming back. He's coming back for me."

Fischer squeezed her gently, let his cheek come to rest against the dark softness of her hair. He glanced around the flat as he did. Sparse furnishings. A couch upholstered in brown cloth, a metal telescoping reading lamp on an end table, a small analog television on top of a shelved wooden cabinet. An old mirror in a chipped silver metal frame hanging on the wall to the right of the door. No pictures, no knick-knacks. Whoever lived here hadn't been planning on staying long.

Had, in fact, been in the process of leaving when Fischer knocked. Through an open doorway on the far side of a narrow dark hallway, Fischer saw a suitcase lying open on the maroon-quilted foot of a bed. He eased out of the embrace, took Susan's hand; he tipped his forehead to hers and said, quietly: "Please. I have the resources. I can keep you safe."

"I can't—"

"Yes, you can." He met her eyes patiently, reassuringly. "My car is outside. You come away with me now, right now, and everything will be okay. I promise."

"You don't have to promise me everything."

"But that's what I want."

She looked at him for a long moment in wonderment and incredulity. Then she smiled, if still a little uncertainly, caressed his cheek, kissed him on the lips. There was nothing uncertain about the kiss. "Let me get my bags."

She stepped away from him, moved toward the bedroom. Fischer moved to follow. "Here, let me give you a hand—"

A sharp knock. A man's voice called from beyond the front door of the flat: "Susan, it's me. Open up."

It was Chris.

Surprise and fear jolted through Fischer in equal measure; like him, Susan for a moment stood very still. "Just a minute, Chris," she called. "I'll be right there." She took Fischer by the arm, began to steer him toward what had to be the kitchen; she looked at him desperately and mouthed her next words: "Come on—"

Something struck the far side of the door with blunt and tremendous force. The door splintered at its hinges, caved inward. And, like that, Chris, the bogeyman in a black sweatshirt, was with them inside the flat.

He took a moment to rub his battering-ram of a shoulder, to grimace as he did. Immobilized by almost a dream-state terror, Fischer could do nothing but watch. "Those are the magic words, aren't they, Sue?" Chris panted. "'Just a minute.' They say so much when you've got someone to hide." He turned to Fischer and added, his tone good-natured but his face unsmiling: "You know, man, I love— I fucking _love_— your Jag."

Then he punched Fischer in the stomach. Only it wasn't just a punch. The pain was sudden, apocalyptic, awful; the air grunted from Fischer's lungs.

A blade, attached to the handle of a knife different from the one Chris had held to Susan's neck at Fischer-Morrow, was buried in his midriff. Fischer stared in shocked incomprehension at the blood now spreading across the front of his sweatshirt, and Chris, as if by way of clarification, yanked the blade free and stabbed him again. Again, and again after that. Susan screamed.

"Susie," said Chris, "I'm sorry, but I think I've had just about enough of your shit."

The odd thing was, Fischer was still standing when Chris turned his attention, and the straight, bloody blade of his second knife, Susan's way. It was as if he knew that the pattern and depth of the wounds to Fischer's torso effectively neutralized him as a threat; Fischer, staggering, trying to gasp breath into a punctured lung, was in fact beginning to lose the feeling in his legs. As he did, however, he became aware of something else: a weight in the back waistband of his jeans. He reached behind himself, pawed under his sweatshirt at the small of his back, felt the handle of a gun.

A gun.

He pulled it free with numbing fingers. It was an old-style snub-barrel .38, its cylinder loaded with bullets. Vaguely he remembered— he _thought _he remembered— Browning suggesting that he take a firearms course after he was mugged. None of that mattered now. He disengaged the safety, leveled the pistol at the back of Chris's head.

"No, Chris," he said, clearly. "I think we've had enough of yours."

With Susan twisting her wrist free of his grip, Chris turned to face him.

And Fischer shot him through the left eye.

Chris's eye socket became a crater; brain matter and blood burst from the back of his head. A fragment of slug or a chunk of skull struck and shattered the mirror behind him. He crumpled to the floor. Fischer fell a moment later. Sat down, really: he could no longer feel his legs. Susan took the gun from his hand even as sitting proved too difficult and he tipped onto his right side. Knowing that the beating of his heart was no longer the certainty it had always been, Fischer felt calm but afraid. A spreading numbness was driving the pain from his wounded torso.

"I have to get help." Susan whispered the words around a sob. She was kneeling beside him. Her eyes were brimming with tears.

Fischer looked up at her. A realization, the last of a lifetime: _I'm dying._

"Stay with me," he said.

She looked into his eyes. "It'll only take a minute."

"Don't go." He caught her right hand with numb fingers, held on. "Please—"

"You'll be fine. I promise. I promise you that." A tear splashed onto Fischer's cheek as she leaned close to him. She smoothed his hair away from his temples, kissed his forehead, his cheek, his lips. Then she took her hand from his, straightened away, and was gone.

In her absence, stillness began to settle in the flat. Almost as if he and his fading heartbeat had been alone there the entire time. Pieces of the shattered mirror, blood-spattered, lay all around him. In the shards, obliquely, Robert Fischer watched himself die, and die, and die.

#####

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	5. Chapter 5

**A/N:** Well, this is it. I hope you've enjoyed reading this beast; I've very much enjoyed writing it. (Here's hoping, too, that the ending doesn't land with too much of a crushing _thud_.) Take care, thank you for the comments, and I will try to get caught up on my replies. If, as an inveterate wastrel, I don't, know that I am grateful for your readership. Catch you later!

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Someone was shaking him by the right shoulder. He could hear himself inhaling, exhaling, not gasping, not panting, the kind of deep, slow breathing by which he might mark out a place for himself within a darkness as heavy as earth.

"Mr. Fischer?" a woman's voice asked.

"Susan—" Fischer said, and opened his eyes; he woke up.

Nancy Crawford, a concerned frown on her face, was looking down at him. "Were you here all night, Mr. Fischer?" she asked.

He was lying on the sofa in his office at Fischer-Morrow. Still wearing his dirty jeans, his second sweatshirt. No blood on his chest and torso. He stared at the stab wounds that weren't there.

"I must have been," he mumbled. His mouth was very dry. He sat up; not knowing what else to do, he looked at his watch. It was six-twenty. "What are you doing here so early, Nancy?"

"I'm always here this early, Mr. Fischer."

Fischer swung his mud-smeared boots to the floor and for a long moment sat without moving while aftershocks of emotion shook through him. Fear and sadness. Anger, a terrible sense of loss. Love, more terrible still. He found himself trying not to cry in front of his secretary. Nancy gently squeezed his shoulder, then discreetly moved away.

"You might go up to the penthouse, sir, to tidy yourself," she said. She took a tumbler from the drinks cabinet, ran water from the filtered tap in Fischer's private bathroom. He took the glass gratefully when she brought it to him. "Your father isn't there; he's left for Los Angeles."

The fiftieth-floor penthouse. _Cold heaven_, Fischer thought, drinking his water. Maurice, disliking to commute and seeming to draw power from proximity to the focal point of his empire, as much as claimed the place for his own, but he— thoughtfully— permitted Robert room enough for toiletries and a change of clothes.

"No, Nancy, it's alright. I'll go home and get cleaned up." Fischer set his empty glass on an end table, stood up. As he did, he spotted a drop of blood, now dried from garnet to reddish brown, on the carpeting near the sofa.

_Susan_.

"One good thing this morning, anyway," Nancy was saying. She took something from the edge of his desk, held it out for him to see. "I found this."

It was the black plastic folder.

"I must have mis-stacked something yesterday," she continued. She seemed oblivious to Fischer's stare. "I moved a pile of papers from my in-pan when I got here this morning, and there it was. Should I return it to Mr. Browning's office, sir?"

"No, Nancy, thank you. I'll return it to him myself."

He took the folder and his briefcase, still on his desk where he'd placed it last night. He had to force himself to keep from bolting for the elevators. He rode down to the executive parking level, and there in his Jaguar with shaking hands he opened the folder, pawed past Susan Gaumont's picture to the page of her file that showed her purported address in Surry Hills. It was the same as last night, the same as his dream. He fumbled the key into the ignition and started the engine.

#####

He knew, through the tightening grip of early rush-hour traffic, that it was impossible, unthinkable: it wouldn't be the same place. But it was. Almost. A white metal sign spiked into the grass out front told of an APARTMENT FOR RENT 1 BR. Fischer parked the Jaguar where he'd parked in his dream, crossed the street, and went in through the open front glass door, past the mausoleum of post boxes, the brown metal fire door beyond. He remembered the ground-floor walls as pale green; now they were a dusty yellow. The carpeting underfoot as he took the stairs three at a time was a darker shade of brown. He went to 304.

He found the door intact.

His heart was pounding, but not from the climb. He raised his right hand and knocked.

No reply. No sound of motion from within. Fischer knocked again, then tried the knob. It turned in his hand. He opened the door.

Nothing. Nothing inside. The flat was completely empty. Early morning sun shone in at the curtainless window. The carpeting had been torn up; the hardwood boards underfoot were dusty gray, rough with spots of glue. Fischer stepped inside, the ghost-pressure of fingers on his left bicep, and moved toward what had to be the kitchen. To his right, through an open doorframe across a narrow dark hallway, a second curtainless window admitted sunlight into an empty bedroom.

Behind him, a man asked: "Can I help you?"

Fischer turned. The speaker was leaning in at the apartment's open door. He was thin, pale, black-haired, twentyish, slightly less than average height; he wore jeans and what had to have been a very old black concert tee. _ELO_. _Time_. Faded peach-and-blue applique dripped like _The Persistence of Memory_ down his flat belly.

"We're having someone in about the lock downstairs; still, we'd prefer people to stop by the office before they come up for a look." The man, the landlord, spoke, possibly, a little too clearly. His expression bespoke a suspicion that might shift quickly from "polite" to "I'm calling the police." "You are here about the flat, aren't you?"

"I'm, uh, not sure."

"Of course, it doesn't look right with the carpet gone," the landlord continued, stepping inside. He offered Fischer an apologetic smile. "It was damaged. Water leak, you see. We've had the plumbing put right; now we're waiting on the carpet layers. Should be any day, now."

Fischer asked, his voice emotionless: "How long has it been empty?"

"About a month, give or take."

Fischer felt numb. He thought he could see the remnants of a dark circular stain like a shadow in the floorboards by the door. "Water, you say?"

"Yes. Something I probably shouldn't admit, but the old girl's pipes aren't getting any younger." He shrugged, looked appraisingly about the flat. "Still, it's a good space for the price. Convenient, amenities—"

As he turned his head, the sun through the front-room window directly lit his eyes. There was something familiar about them. Hazel, strangely pale in the light.

"Have we met?" Fischer asked.

The man looked at him, bemused, his expression in limbo, now, between smile and frown. "Not to my knowledge, no."

"My mistake." Fischer made a show of taking one last look around the empty room. "I, umm, I'll think about it." He offered the man his right hand; the man shook it. "Thank you for your time."

"No problem."

He led the way out; Fischer followed. Just inside the door, in a terminus of sweepings against the wall, something sparkled. He bent down, picked it up. Tangled in a furry clump of dust was a tiny piece of glass, silver-backed. A shard from a broken mirror. Fischer carefully brushed it clean. He could see himself reflected in it.

#####

He went home and showered and shaved and dressed for work. He was ravenously hungry; he would order breakfast when he got back to the office. He wanted to call in sick, but the excuses were too implausible, too embarrassing. What would he say? That he'd had a bad dream? That, worse, he could no longer separate his dreams from reality? He had, he realized, razor at jaw then toothbrush in mouth, an even more childish reason for not wanting to stay in his flat, one he would never admit to anyone: he didn't want to be alone. All he wanted, in lieu of having the impossible, that is to say a girl who likely never existed, was for things to be normal, to be as they were, pre-Gilliam's, four nights ago.

#####

He didn't know it then, but he'd passed a test.

#####

_So much for the stage-one checklist,_ thought Susan Gaumont, as she waited for what would no doubt be the first of too many drinks.

She'd forwarded Miles their initial report the better part of a day ago, shortly after Nick returned from the empty flat in Surry Hills. Criterion one: the subject's lucid reaction to, and interaction within, the dream-state, as evidenced by Robert Fischer's ability to converse rationally within said state. Criterion two: the ability to remember things from the dream-state, as evidenced by Fischer making use of the warehouse ad, him calling Chris by name. Criterion three, or the ability to continue patterns of action between the dream-state and the waking-state, or top-level reality: Fischer remembering, and echoing, Susan's comment about his dry cleaner, his use of the warehouse ad to find the Koran that Susan and her team had hidden for him. Criterion four: the ability not only to react to the dream-state but to create in response to such reaction, as embodied in the gun with which Fischer had "killed" Chris. What was known, technically, as "a semi-conscious defensive manifestation." And, finally, criterion five: the subject's ability to recover, however morbid the term might seem, from death within the dream-state: not only had Fischer had the presence of mind to re-check the Surry Hills flat this morning, but their contact at Fischer-Morrow had reported that, despite his having "died" in a dream last night, Mr. Fischer had made all but the earliest of his day's meetings and had gone to lunch at his usual time. Whether he had actually eaten said lunch their contact didn't say.

Now Susan and Nick and Chris were to stay put until Miles made his initial assessment of freshly checklisted Robert Fischer, which assessment was to take place after Fischer left the office tonight. Depending on the results of that assessment, the three of them might be in Sydney for another week or more, as Fischer began stage two, the focused, conscious, detail-specific stage, of his dream-defense training; they might be leaving the country tomorrow. For now, each of them had an executive suite in the Observatory Hotel, aptly named. Miles, as always, might have saved the company money and dormed the three of them together: the most unavoidable symptom of post-dreamwork crashing was a fear of being alone. (They were, Susan tried not to think, less than a kilometer from Robert Fischer's flat; he was apt to be suffering the effects of after-dream, too.) Consequently, while Nick did strange and mage-like things with alcohol at his suite's full bar, Susan was sitting on the floor of his living area with her back resting against the couch, listening through the open bedroom door while Chris made what would be, in Cincinnati, a very early morning call to his wife and their four-year-old daughter.

"No real koala, honey, I'm sorry," he was saying. A pause long enough to contain a little girl's sleepy _Why...?_ "'Cause it would make the koala sad to leave home, wouldn't it? He'd miss all his friends." A second pause. Susan could picture his patient smile. "Yes, baby, and his mommy and daddy, too. I'll get you a nice stuffed koala instead, okay?" Later, she would phone her mum in Manchester, and Chris and Nick would listen to her; in due time, Nick would have an audience when he checked in with his boyfriend in New York. All out of their need to feel normal, grounded, connected.

For now, Nick, bless him, having ventured out and found limes and, more incredibly, fresh mint, was making mojitos while the three of them waited for room service. Susan, watching him turn a tall frosted cylinder of a glass into what looked for all the world like a cloud-gray terrarium, felt, beneath her appreciation, a stirring of sadness.

"He was right, you know," she said. "Fischer. That first night I met with him."

Nick casually kept his eyes on his alchemy. "About what?"

"He asked if I was working. I told him I wasn't. I lied."

"Is this the point in the evening at which you air your madonna-whore complex, dearest?"

Susan smiled slightly, despite herself. "Afraid it is, yes."

Nick said, in his voice like worn silk: "Please continue."

And Susan replied, as she always did: "I'm going to quit."

"Again." Nick stepped from behind the bar, crossed to her gingerly, conscious of spills, and handed down that first terrarium-like glass.

Susan met his eyes as she took it. "I mean it this time."

"I know you do, Susie." He looked at her long enough for he to see he was sincere, then returned to his laboratory space. As he reached for an empty glass, he made an end to a long line of ellipses: "Again."

They all came to the dreamtime from very different backgrounds. Nick, an actor and performance artist forever in search of new sensations, once told Susan (and they were his words, his alone) that he didn't want to end up as "just another art-fag with a smack habit." Having done time for armed robbery and assault, Chris first experienced shared dreaming as a form of therapy, as a condition of his parole. And Susan was where she was because of a breakdown.

#####

A little less than four years ago, she and Tom Warwick, wiry, sandy-haired, good-natured Tom, had volunteered to test the RAF's new virtual-reality flight-simulation program, DreamTech. Only it wasn't virtual: it was, in fact, exactly as advertised. They were administered special sedatives; they trained as a flight crew within a shared dream-state. All of which was fine, even if the concept itself was more than slightly unbelievable: the equipment and flight scenarios were absolutely realistic, and Tom and Susan said as much in their evaluations and reports.

Three weeks after they began their test of DreamTech, Susan was Tom's co-pilot in a real-world shakedown flight of a refitted Tornado GR4 over Snowdonia. It was nighttime. The sky through the filtered canopy was a high-latitude blackish-blue. "You know what the best thing is, Gaumont—?" Tom asked. In retrospect, his voice over the helmet feed would seem dreamy, a little absent.

Having spent much of the day putting trainees through their flailing paces in a Hawk T1, Susan was in no mood for reverie. "Cut the chatter, Warwick."

"— if we crash," Tom continued, possibly unhearing, "we just wake up."

The official report regarding what happened next would say that he'd had a leak in his oxygen mask, leading to hypoxic dementia. Whatever the explanation, whatever the conjecture, whatever the excuse, the fact, for Susan's purposes, remained: he drove the jet right into the side of a mountain.

Susan didn't have time to unlock the controls he'd frozen. A low-altitude ejection. A crash, an explosion. Warwick was killed outright. Susan broke her right arm, her right leg. She nearly broke her neck. She was off-duty for six weeks, and then she was deemed permanently unfit to fly. The RAF discharged her quietly, with only a written reminder regarding how training procedures, most especially DreamTech, fell under the auspices of the Official Secrets Act. Two weeks later, she was standing on Waterloo Bridge at three a.m., her head full of booze and leftover painkillers, watching the Thames whorl about the stone-clad pilings. She'd had oxy-fueled thoughts about dying like Vivien Leigh in the eponymously titled film; unable to find a bus willing to hit her on the bridge at this hour of the morning, she'd resigned herself to death by cliché: the old classic of jumping to a watery grave.

"There is an alternative, you know."

A man was standing next to her. No surprise there: she was so stoned the entire Household Division might have stomped and clopped to a halt beside her and she wouldn't have noticed. She nodded unsteadily toward the bridge upriver. "Westminster's a bit too trafficky this time of night."

"I'd like to offer you a job, Miss Gaumont." His accent, she thought, in drunken arrogance, was gentrified low-grade. Like that of a council flats boy who'd managed to make something of himself.

"I'd like to tell you to piss off," she replied.

"In the morning. Or afternoon. After you've had a chance to sober up." He took her helpfully but quite firmly by the upper arm.

"I'm a trained fir- firt- fighter," she said. "I could break your bluffy neck."

"Later," said Miles. He hadn't given his name, but that's who he would prove to be, eleven hours of sleep and sobering hence. "You come home with me, you pass out on my sofa, and after a decent breakfast and a couple of aspirin, you'll listen to what I have to say. Deal?"

In the easy mutability of extreme intoxication, Susan turned her eyes back to the black water and nodded again. He kept his hold on her arm, drew her back from the railing, and she leaned with drunken shamelessness into his topcoated side as he led her off the bridge toward another cliché, one slightly more livable than the first: the future and redemption.

#####

Now, already, and again, three and a half years later, the excuses were cycling through her mind, and even Nick's magic couldn't help: The fact that hers was a brutal, unforgiving job. The fact that essentially she was paid to molest unwitting strangers. The fear in Rober Fischer's too-blue eyes, raw and searing and agonized, as he lay dying in a dream.

The soft sound of pleasure and trust, deep in his throat, the one and only time he kissed her in the real world.

She would talk to Miles. She would do so with the counterbalances already in place: she was good at what she did, and, in a world without legal protection for those who fell victim to mental extractors, what she did was a public service, practically a form of heroism. He would listen to her with sincere sympathy. And once he'd released her and Nick and Chris from further participation in Robert Fischer's dream-training, she would take a week off, then call him for her next assignment. As she always did.

But the strain was starting to linger. She drank her mojito there on the floor, with her back leaned up against Nick's sofa, and fingered the piece of amethyst hung from a silver chain around her neck.

_Don't go. Please—_

"Don't worry," she whispered. "I won't."

#####

As Susan Gaumont reached the midpoint of her first of many drinks, as a knock and a call of "Room service!" came from the outer side of the door to Nick's suite, in a bar called Gilliam's, Miles met his second Fischer.

He'd met his first thirty-eight days earlier.

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"Young people of wealth and power are sheltered" was one of the things Miles told potential clients. He hated to think of it as a sales pitch, even though that was exactly what it was, because he believed every word. "Understandably, perhaps inevitably. It's like riding in a limo instead of a roadster: they're insulated from sound and motion, from wind and heat and cold. They need to feel the road."

He'd spoken those very words to Maurice Fischer five weeks ago. Robert, Maurice's son and the present subject of Miles's pitch, was in the United States on Fischer-Morrow corporate business; Maurice met with Miles in his office on the fortieth floor of Fischer-Browning's world headquarters in Sydney. Said office, that being the father's, noted Miles, was on the opposite end of the floor from the son's.

In Fischer's presence, Miles felt his standard-issue unease. It wasn't that the man before him was incredibly wealthy or incredibly powerful (wealth and power being precursors to the most well-founded paranoia and, hence, mainstay traits among those who approached Miles and his teams for help), or, more chillingly, that he had about him the slightly loose-boned appearance of a man unwilling to admit, either to himself or others, that he was in the early stages of succumbing to a terminal disease. No, Miles's discomfort arose from the fact that people like Maurice Fischer inevitably correlated economic stature with raw altitude— hence today's meeting on the fortieth floor of Fischer-Morrow— and Miles, quite simply, disliked heights. He'd worked long enough in dreams to understand the literal importance of grounding; right now, the good soil of New South Wales was some one hundred meters away, give or take a civilized overcoating of concrete and asphalt.

And the office would have to be all windows, too, wouldn't it? As if people like Maurice Fischer would have not only the world below for their own but the sun and the clouds, too, as pets in the bargain. Still, the distraction of space and height made it easier for Miles to focus on Fischer himself, on the man's time-jagged face, his strikingly blue eyes, weary but still sparked with the potential for ferocity.

Theft within dreams, or extraction, a procedure by which specially skilled and trained agents of espionage entered into their victim's mind and stole secrets and ideas: it was the thing, unbelievable but true, against which Miles and his teams offered their very wealthy and powerful clients defensive training.

Such training, at least as provided by MG Consultants, Limited, consisted of two stages. In the first stage, Susan Gaumont and her team would subject the client to a series of dream-state and real-world scenarios and assess his or her reactions to those scenarios.

"A rough-hewing, if you will, of the client's mental defenses," Miles said. "Your son, for instance, Mr. Fischer—" — for it was Robert who was to be dream-trained, if Robert's father saw clear to make use of the services Miles and his people had to offer. "The initial goal would be to break him out of himself psychologically, to introduce him to selflessness—"

"My son is not a selfish man," Maurice Fischer said, not judgmentally, not defensively. Merely a statement of fact, by the sound of it.

Miles knew better. He might have said, "I never said he was, Mr. Fischer." As it was, he left the words unspoken: he knew from experience that men as powerful as Maurice Fischer were too quick to read reassurance as sarcasm or insincerity. Instead, he continued: "We expose him, under real-world but controlled conditions, to things like betrayal and fear, loyalty and pain, devotion and sacrifice. All heavy hitters. Big, solid blocks of feeling." "Blocks," Miles thought, being, in the end, the operative word. "Something I've learned, Mr. Fischer: young men of privilege need to be jostled about a bit before they're open to training."

"Knocked out of their comfort zones, you mean," Maurice said. He might have smiled, just a bit. He pushed back his wheeled leather-clad throne of an office chair, stood, moved casually away from the desk. His destination was a mahogany cabinet wall-set between two ceiling-high sets of bookshelves. "May I offer you a drink?"

"Very kind of you, Mr. Fischer."

Fischer uncapped, poured, returned. He offered Miles one of two tulip-shaped glasses, red-amber liquid pooled within. Miles sniffed, sipped appreciatively. "Angel's share," he murmured.

Reseated, Fischer took his own sip before he continued. "So your first team introduces uncertainty and instability into my son's life."

"Precisely."

"Then you build him back up."

"No, Mr. Fischer," Miles said. "He builds himself back up."

"Explain."

"For this to work, for the training to work, at least at first, your son has to feel, innately, that he's fighting not necessarily to protect your company or its secrets but something in which he, himself, absolutely believes."

Now Fischer's smile was, if remote, definite nonetheless. Miles had the feeling he was witnessing an expression as rare as the cognac in his glass. "So we're back to selfishness."

"If you prefer. The original survival instinct. In this first stage, we inculcate willingness, the ability to react to threat. And the threat, Mr. Fischer, is all too real. Extractors are, in a word, insidious. It's hacking taken to a whole new level. A type of crime that, as you may or may not be aware, governments worldwide are still practically powerless to fight. A violation that is nearly impossible to trace or to prove." Miles paused. He looked evenly at Fischer and said: "I should know how dangerous these criminals are, Mr. Fischer. Many of them learned their skills from me."

"Back when the technology was still legal."

Miles nodded. "Precisely."

Fischer turned his glass slowly in his hands, frowning, looking almost as if he were listening for the click of tumblers in a lock. "For the training to be most effective, you say, the trainee must initially be unaware that he or she is being trained."

"Which leads to a quite-serious conundrum."

"Namely, the question of consent," Fischer said.

"Exactly. Your son can't know what's being done to him. This isn't a class, a seminar. His awareness would change the outcome; his awareness would be an impediment. Very likely he'd emerge with less-than-perfect skills. He must be absolutely open and receptive. This implies, Mr. Fischer, a fearful level of vulnerability." Miles gave Fischer a moment to mull before he continued, with a quieter reassurance: "But it also provides a practical demonstration. An antidote to skepticism, if you will. Your son will realize, if only after the fact, that, yes, in the right or wrong hands, a dream can manipulate the dreamer. But he'll also learn that the dreamer can manipulate the world of the dream."

His duty as salesman done, Miles finished his most excellent cognac while he waited for Fischer's response. His eyes on his own glass, Fischer very quietly said what might have been "Do it for yourself, Robert."

"Pardon me, Mr. Fischer?"

"Do it," Maurice Fischer said. "He can take it."

#####

By the looks of him, Robert Fischer had, indeed, taken it. He was bit shaken, possibly, a bit sad and pale, but the young man occupying the stool beside the one on which Miles sat seemed to embody the enduring, steely-eyed difference between "delicate" and "frail." Shaken, yes, but not shaking. Fischer held his glass with a steady hand.

Miles contemplated the contents of his own glass, set before him on the illuminated marble surface of the bar. For a pub cognac, it was very good. Not, of course, as good as the drink Maurice Fischer had provided him (only the gods could afford, on a regular basis, such godlike libations), but, for a suburban tavern called Gilliam's, very good nonetheless.

He took a drink and said to Robert Fischer, conversationally (the place was full but not packed, and the noise level was reasonable: no need to shout): "You look down in the dumps, son. Was she worth it?"

Fischer frowned for a moment, brushy brows descending on skylike eyes. Then, looking at Miles and seeming to see no threat, he relaxed. "I'm not sure."

"I'll take that as a qualified 'yes.'"

"Are you a mind reader?" Fischer asked, drolly.

"A seasoned observer, that's all. If it were business, you'd be drinking alone. When a man's heart is broken, he wants the world to know."

Fischer drank. "Those who wish us harm don't always play according to the rules, do they?"

"Are you so certain that harm is what she intended?"

"No." Fischer offered his glass a mildly sardonic smile. "I'm not really sure what she intended."

"But she hurt you."

"I'm not even sure of that."

"I know what it's like," Miles said. "Almost like death, having someone so near and being unable to reach that someone." He could understand, now, the impact that Robert Fischer had had on Susan Gaumont, which had been all too plain from her tone when she called that morning with her initial report on Fischer's stage-one training. (Conversely, Miles could understand her likely effect on Fischer, but that was another matter entirely, one to do, technically, with emotional transference within the dream-state but actually involving the idea, more plainly and purely, that she was a beautiful young woman whose compassion lent an honest depth to her acting, and Mr. Fischer was, fairly obviously, a lonely young man). It wasn't his looks— many of the blueblood youngsters with whom Miles and his team dealt were of the genetic-perfection bent— no: there was something in the way he was trying to project, as it were, a sort of forcefield with those too-clear eyes. The fact was the boy had an endearing gentleness about him, and about which he, possibly out of misplaced deference to his father or his own social and economic status, seemed, very much unfortunately, quietly ashamed. Such negativity, left unchecked, was apt to sour into bitterness.

"Still," Miles continued, "we can always chalk it up to experience. We need things to shake us free of our comfort zones. To open us up, to allow us to see the resources at our command, our strengths as well as our weaknesses. To allow us to grow."

"'That which does not kill me makes me stronger.'"

"Absolutely. An oldie but goldie. And one hundred percent true. Tell me something: if you could see her again, what would you say to her?"

Hesitation. Fischer turned his glass slowly between his fingertips. "I would ask her if it was real— if any of it was real— for her."

"Because it was real for you."

"Mm." Softly: "Yes."

A ruminative pause, shared. Then Miles pushed back his left cuff, read the hour from his old black-faced Cabot. "Lord, that's the time?" He offered Fischer an apologetic smile. "If you'll excuse me, I really must be going. Afraid I'm expected elsewhere. You know how it is. Business."

#####

As his drinking companion eased off his bar stool, Fischer got his first good look at him. Close-trimmed curly hair, gray dimming what had once been a very pure gold, a plainly handsome face now weary with jowls, eyes of teacup-glaze blue concealing intensity beneath lazy lids. A build, within a well-tailored charcoal-gray suit, that was solid but not portly. A precise, military-like bearing through the chest and shoulders, which stood in contrast to the quiet geniality of his expression and the free-flow purple, blue, and dusty rose of his watered-silk necktie. He seemed casually to enforce an agelessness that might have encompassed a range of years between fifty-five and seventy-five; in any case, time had had little dominion over his considerable height. As he stood, the man reached for the breast pocket of his suit jacket. Fischer was a moment quicker freeing his own wallet: given the last few days, especially his fear and disorientation this morning, the cost of a drink was a small price to pay for pleasant, even reassuring, company.

"No. Please. Allow me, son." The man opened his wallet, smiling as he did, and placed a crisp twenty-dollar bill on the bar. He looked at Fischer with friendly twinkles in his New-Spode-blue eyes. "I have a feeling we'll meet again."

He left.

A moment later, Fischer noticed that the man had left his wallet lying on the bar. "Wait—"

But the man was gone. And the wallet looked familiar. Very familiar. Out of curiosity, Fischer opened it.

It was his. The one he lost the night he met Susan Gaumont. His credit cards were there; so was his driver's license. Save for the twenty the man had placed on the bar, the cash hadn't been touched. A white business card was tucked into the crease of the side-fold. _MG Consultants, Limited._

Fischer laid a ten on top of the twenty and left Gilliam's. The night air was cool; a fresh breeze was blowing from the east. He looked toward the lights of the shops and restaurants; he looked in turn into the quiet tree-shadowed darkness between the houses and blocks of flats. Alert but unafraid, he set off the way the man was likely to have gone.

#####

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**THE END**


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